Thursday 5 March 2026 – Guess what? The drive down to Christchurch from Kaikoura is quite scenic.
It’s reassuring to note that they take some precautions against falling boulders in places,
but then we were heading into a place with quite a record of geological instability.
We arrived in Christchurch in good time check in to our hotel, the very well-organised George. Whilst Jane settled in to our room, I went to hand back our hire car; the nice manager at Budget was good enough to waive the charge for the extra day we incurred through the mix-up back in Auckland. On the way back I got some milk in for the inevitable cups of Twinings finest Earl Grey and also discovered a significant characteristic of Christchurch – the street art,
which is sprinkled liberally throughout the city, quite often on walls surrounding car parks. There are a lot of car parks on the open spaces throughout Christchurch that arise courtesy, one suspects, of the massive earthquakes that devastated the city in September 2010 and, more tragically, in February 2011, more of which later. I also passed the Victoria Jubilee Clock
built in celebration of Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1897 (and rebuilt in 1930, presumably after an earthquake in 1929). I also noted that they have problems with the English language here similar to the ones we have in England.
The hotel room carried a reminder of the earthquake, too.
Anyway, we had some time to ourselves, both during this afternoon and tomorrow morning. So we went for walks. Obviously. These are photographs from our peregrinations, not necessarily in the order in which we saw things.
Street Art
We took a lot of photos of the street art, because there’s a lot of street art. There are some huge installations across the city centre
and many, many smaller examples.
It seems that any space is game for being covered.
Other Art
As well as the murals, there are plenty of other installations around the city, both old and new.
Architecture
Obviously, since much of the city was destroyed in 2010 and 2011, there are many, many new buildings. Accommodation has sprung up all over the city with an agenda to attract people back to living there.
One famous post-earthquake construction, a container mall (similar in concept to the Tin Town that sprang up after the Napier earthquake), has since been demolished, and replaced with a very modern shopping centre
and the city’s restored tramline runs a tourist hop-on, hop-off service through it and round the other sights of the central area.
The city itself feels a little….odd. I suppose the lack of skyscrapers (there’s unsurprisingly a moratorium on tall buildings except under exceptional circumstances) and the ubiquity of modern constructions have a bearing on this. It’s a very pleasant city to walk around in. Parts of it have been restored to their previous glory, like New Regent Street,
along which the tram runs.
There’s been plenty of construction of new buildings, of course. The river Avon runs through the city, giving it a pleasant, green, focus
(the statue in the river there is, yes, an Anthony Gormley).
This greenness is not normal, by the way. Apparently, by this time of the year, all of the green spaces have usually been burnt brown; but it’s been such a wet summer that the grass is still green. As we walked around, the weather was delightful – 25°C and sunshine – so Christchurch folk’s bad luck was our good fortune.
Some modern buildings are just Deloitteful
but all the time the spectre of such a recent upheaval (literal and figurative) hangs over the city.
There are also several handsome old buildings which were damaged in the earthquake and which haven’t been restored (yet, one hopes),
including this teacher training college, which is a very striking building.
There is a museum, Quake City, dedicated to the earthquake, which is a very intense education about the impact it had. One thing I hadn’t appreciated was the constant barrage of quakes that has hit the city since its inception. Since 1844 there have been over 20 earthquakes in the area – they’re almost routine. What marks the 2010/2011 earthquakes out is the timing: September 2010 was a larger upheaval (7.1), but it happened in the middle of the night when the city was quiet. The one that followed, in February 2011, was “only” 6.1 but it was in the middle of the day, many of the buildings were weakened from September and so foundered, and many lives were lost in the collapsing buildings. The devastation was huge and widespread, as shown in photographs in Quake City.
Some buildings survived,
Was a Church, is now a microbrewery!
and, particularly, wooden ones tended to be able to withstand the shaking.
But, of course, many didn’t, notably the cathedral and the basilica.
Political wrangling has put a stop to restoration work of this cathedral, which seems an outrage until one considers that there’s not enough taxpayer money to go around and there are many more important calls on what money there is than, frankly, restoring churches. In that context, it’s a bit strange to note that there was money to build a brand new sports stadium
(seating capacity 30,000 but without its own car parking) but not to construct a mass transit rail system which would go a long way to relieve the city’s chronic rush hour traffic gridlock. There’s clearly been a lot of building, many examples of which could possibly have been funded entirely from the private sector.
An example, though, of what can be done is shown by the Cardboard Cathedral, formally called the Transitional Cathedral of the city, which is a truly remarkable (a) building and (b) piece of thinking.
There really is a huge amount of cardboard in its construction.
In a move that should surprise no-one, the building regs were changed somewhat after the earthquake, and ever since, all buildings have to have a minimum 50 years of expected life; the cardboard cathedral is expected to last well over a century. We learned this from a conversation with a lovely chap called Richard Parker, a volunteer at the cathedral and also a man involved with the city’s building programmes.
The Cardboard Cathedral is quite an inspiring construction, both for what it represents – rebuilding after a major setback – and how it’s done – with vision and imagination. Our visit to it and to Quake City were probably the most significant segments of our wanderings around in this very pleasant city; and we weren’t quite done. We had our fourth and final meeting with old friends, and were able to explore a few other aspects of the place. I’ll detail them in the next entry.
