28 Feb – 05 Mar: Christchurch Part 1

Christchurch had always been a beacon before I had even set off, a city I’d heard had been through a series of huge earthquakes a couple of years ago, and was at the start of re-building an entire city centre. I’d been looking at job adverts appearing and disappearing from various internet sites whilst I was in Europe, India and Nepal. I’d starting applying for jobs whilst in Nepal, more for the sake of getting my CV out to companies in the city than expecting any immediate return.

The first thing you notice about Christchurch when you arrive is that it sits on an incredibly, pancake flat plain, the other big cities of New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin) are all very hilly (Dunedin even has the steepest residential street in the world!). With Auckland, the sky tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, stands atop a hill the city centre is built around meaning you can see it from everywhere. Wellington is so crammed onto a shoreline between the sea and inland hills, that its forced a number of big skyscrapers to huddle together along the shoreline making it a very simple city to find your way around. Dunedin likewise, the city is along three main roads running lengthways along a harbour, if you’re going up a hill, you’re going into the suburbs.

But Christchurch is so incredibly flat, and known as the ‘garden city’ very leafy which means it’s hard to orientate yourself, stand on any street in the suburbs and it will likely be tree lined, so you never have any idea where the centre is. If you live there, it would make everything feel very homely, like a cluster of little villages, but to find your way round without a map is impossible!

Having found a friend to store my broken panniers, I went off for a walk around the city centre. I'd read on the internet reports that made it sound like the centre was on the verge of a full re-opening, it was a major surprise to see how non-existent it still is. The main problem is three huge skyscrapers (a hotel and two banking offices). Whilst contractors are busy ripping down everything around them, bearing in mind the city centre is about the size of Leeds, it’s taking a long time. The three tall buildings are all condemned so there is a ‘red-zone’ cordon set around a ‘safe toppling zone’ if another major earthquake to hit and the worst was to happen. Indeed, plenty of earthquakes still rumble all the time: http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/largest but it’s the ones above 6 on the Richter Scale that really create problems.

The river Avon doesnt fit its banks properly
as the bottom is full of 'liquefaction', a silt like
mud that comes up through the ground during earthquakes

Damaged homes in the suburbs, the house is sinking
and the roof is damaged. It is scheduled for demolition
so the garden is overgrown as no-one lives here.

A bridge that has raised up from its normal level
but has been repaired and passable with care

Homes in Sumner where a cliff has given way

Shipping containers protect traffic on the road from rock slides

It’s impossible to make sense of a situation where a city has its centre ripped out, so a whole still functioning major city has to go to work, shop, and be entertained in its suburbs, a real ‘doughnut’ city if there ever was one. What’s even more unusual is to see a Kiwi city looking a mess. New Zealander’s have a fanatical devotion to keeping things neat and tidy so it’s rare to see a city like Christchurch with overgrowing gardens, potholed roads and collapsing fences. With so many people moving out, most streets have a series of empty homes that have been left to nature either because jobs moved elsewhere or they were ‘red-stickered’ as condemned by surveyors.

Damaged buildings just outside the red zone

Bracing on civic buildings

Opposite the civic buildings -
a statue by Mackenzie thorpe
outside the dyslexic institute

The old city centre behind barriers

As with most people watching news reports of the earthquake, I had no idea how bad the situation was. With a relatively low number of reported deaths in the first few days, then with the Japanese tsunami grabbing news headlines soon after, it was easy to fail to notice what had happened here. The 180+ deaths, though relatively low, had a profound effect on the city. In the rest of the world, people say you’re never more than seven steps removed from knowing someone, on the South Island of New Zealand, it’s closer to two, so almost anyone you speak to will know someone who had lost their life. This combined with the loss of everything that made Christchurch great – a huge sports stadium, world class music arena venue, a city centre that Lonely Planet had named the no.1 best thing to see in the whole of New Zealand, all of which are being slowly pulled apart, has had a profound effect on local people. There isnt much 'old' architecure in New Zealand, the grand town halls and city centres that Europeans are used to. What there was was mostly in Christchurch. Much of it has now gone leaving just a question of what will come next and the inevitable concern that it won't be as good.

There is little information about the earthquakes around town, the centre still looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but what there is can be found in the Canterbury museum - and that'll be in my next update.