Alan Turing Memorial

On a bench in Sackville Gardens sits a life-size bronze Alan Turing, holding an apple. Sculptor Glyn Hughes placed him deliberately: the university's science buildings on one side, Canal Street's gay bars on the other — the two halves of a life the state refused to let coexist. Turing did foundational work at the University of Manchester after the war, and it was in this city that he was prosecuted in 1952 for 'gross indecency', chemically castrated by court order, and where he died in 1954 with a cyanide-laced apple at his bedside. The apple in the statue's hand carries all of it — knowledge, the forbidden, and the end. The memorial was unveiled on June 23, 2001, Turing's birthday, funded largely by public donation (Hughes, endearingly, buried his own old computer beneath the plinth). Visitors leave flowers on anniversaries, and the statue anchors Manchester's remarkable memorial cluster: the Beacon of Hope AIDS memorial stands steps away in the same gardens, with Canal Street just beyond.