current site on Oxford Road. The hospital buildings were completely demolished by April 1910 apart from the outpatients department, which continued to deal with minor injuries and dispense medication on this site until the 1930s. The Manchester Public Free Library Reference Department was housed on the site for a number of years before the move to Manchester Central Library in 1934. Landscaped gardens Following the demolition of the hospital, the use of the empty site was uncertain for some years. There was a proposal to erect a new municipal art gallery on the site, and plans were drawn up by the architect Ernest Berry Webber for a large Neoclassical building. However, this scheme was never realised and the city's fine art collection remained in the Manchester City Art Gallery on nearby Mosley Street. Another scheme put forward by the architect Richard Carpenter was to build a large new replacement for Manchester Cathedral on the site. In 1917, the conductor Thomas Beecham proposed the construction of a large opera house, but he went bankrupt before he could advance this plan any further. The "Great Hole of Piccadilly" remained empty throughout the 1910s and 1920s. In the 1930s, it was finally decided not to erect a new building on the former hospital site, but to turn it into a public garden. The area was landscaped and a sunken garden was laid out on the footprint of the former hospital basement, with formal flower beds, a rose garden and flowering cherry trees. In the centre of the new gardens the Corporation placed a bronze sculpture entitled Adrift, depicting a family clinging to a raft in a stormy sea. It was designed by the noted sculptor John Cassidy in 1907 and was gifted to the Manchester Corporation by the wealthy industrialist and art collector James Gresham, founder of Gresham and Craven engineering works, on the condition that the Corporation house it in the planned new art gallery. As the gallery scheme was not realised, Adrift was instead used as the centrepiece of the new sunken gardens. It remained there until 1953, when it was relocated to the south end of the gardens. It was replaced with a commemorative fountain to mark the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. When the Salford painter L. S. Lowry created his 1954 oil painting Piccadilly Gardens, the Coronation Fountain is clearly visible in the centre of the view amid