Shakespeare, Gardens and Rosa Grindon
Manchester’s historic Shakespearean Garden celebrates Rosa Grindon’s vision

What connects Shakespeare, a 104 year old sunken garden in Platt Fields’ Park and a remarkable suffragist? Our Shakespearean Garden is one of the city’s hidden treasures; a formal, sunken, intimate walled garden divided into four geometric quadrants, surrounded by deep banks and with a backdrop of magnificent mature trees. Created as a Shakespearean Garden, it contains plants mentioned in Shakespeare’s works and reflects the formal design principles of the Elizabethan garden. Today, this curious survivor is one of very few remaining Shakespearean gardens in the country, and in April 2026, it was featured in the Smithsonian Magazine’s survey of Shakespeare Gardens around the world.

But behind our garden is a story that’s just as remarkable as the garden itself.

Rosa Grindon was a botanist, Shakespearean scholar, lecturer, suffragist and passionate advocate of education. Born into relatively modest circumstances in rural Derbyshire, she moved to Manchester after her marriage and built a remarkable life around these passions, sharing her knowledge and interests in the hope of enriching the lives of her fellow citizens.

In 1916, as chair of Manchester’s Shakespeare Tercentenary celebrations, Rosa proposed creating a Shakespeare Garden in Whitworth Park as a central part of the city’s commemorations. At the time when the country was at war and money and resources were scarce, she argued that a garden could be created reasonably quickly and ‘at little cost’.

This garden was short lived but provided the inspiration for the larger and more fully realised Shakespearean Garden created in Platt Fields’ Park in 1922, after the war was over.

The story of the garden also takes us back to a particular moment in the history of our cities. Shakespearean Gardens belonged to an era when Britain’s expanding municipal parks were intended as places not simply for recreation, but also for education, culture, beauty and social improvement. There was a growing belief that ordinary people should have free access to things previously associated with privilege.

Rosa embodied this civic ideal

Sadly, until recently, both Rosa, her extensive work and the garden were largely forgotten.

This talk will uncover their fascinating story and ask why these ideas remain important and relevant today.

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About the speaker

Kattie Kincaid lives in Fallowfield and has been project lead for the restoration of the Shakespeare Garden in Platt Fields’ Park since 2021. During this time, the garden has gone from severe neglect to winning ‘Outstanding’ at the RHS Britain in Bloom awards for the last 4 years, with a dedicated group of volunteers now looking after it.

Intrigued by the garden’s name, Kattie began researching the history of Shakespeare Gardens, and in particular, the story of the garden in Platt Fields. Her research led her into the history of Victorian/Edwardian Manchester and to the remarkable story of Rosa Grindon.

Kattie describes herself as ‘an enthusiastic amateur gardener with a newfound, bordering on fanatical, interest in Shakespearean Gardens’. She has since discovered that she is not alone; garden historians, academics and enthusiasts around the world share this rather esoteric interest.

Her research has included visits and private tours with head gardeners at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford and at Sandwell’s Shakespeare Garden, as well as drawing on academic research into Rosa Grindon and the history of Shakespeare Gardens.

In this talk Kattie looks beyond the garden itself to the people and circumstances that brought a Shakespeare Garden to Manchester.

The Platt Fields’ garden was recently featured in Dr Ian Nickson’s exhibition at Manchester Central Library; Shakespeare and Manchester; A Victorian Powerhouse’.