Christchurch: The Garden City That Rebuilt Its Heart

Christchurch, known in Māori as Ōtautahi, was laid out in the eighteen fifties as a planned Church of England settlement on the flat Canterbury plains, a garden city of stone spires and the willow-lined Avon River that Ngāi Tahu know as the Ōtākaro. On the twenty-second of February twenty eleven, at twelve fifty-one in the afternoon, a shallow magnitude six point three earthquake struck the centre, killed one hundred and eighty-five people, and tore the spire from the stone cathedral that named Cathedral Square. Everything Christchurch has done since reads as one long, deliberate act: not a triumphant before-and-after, but a city choosing, stone by numbered stone, to repair itself while keeping its green spine intact. Walk it at your own pace and you read both the grief and the recovery in the same afternoon.

The planned city and its broken heart

Christchurch was designed to have a centre. When the settlement was surveyed in eighteen fifty, the plan set Cathedral Square at the crossing of Colombo and Worcester Streets and reserved part of it for the cathedral that would give the city its name. Long before that survey, this was Māori land: Ngāi Tahu are mana whenua of Ōtautahi, the people who hold customary authority here, with Waitaha and Ngāti Māmoe before them. The city's Māori name comes from the Ngāi Tahu chief Tautahi, whose settlement stood on the banks of the Ōtākaro, the river the settlers renamed the Avon.

The Cathedral Square rebuild walk begins where the city always meant to begin. On the east side of the square stands the ChristChurch Cathedral, whose story is the story of the whole city in one building. Its cornerstone was laid on the sixteenth of December eighteen sixty-four, to a design by the English architect George Gilbert Scott, with the New Zealand architect Benjamin Mountfort supervising from eighteen seventy-three. The nave and tower were consecrated on the first of November eighteen eighty-one, and the spire rose sixty-three metres, about two hundred and seven feet, above the square. For generations it was the mark you steered by. Then, at twelve fifty-one on that February afternoon, the spire was destroyed, leaving only the lower half of the tower. That image became the enduring picture of the broken city. After years of argument over whether to demolish or save it, the city chose to reinstate it, and the work goes on today in full public view.

Reading the grief

The rebuild walk does not hurry past the loss. It comes down to the river, to Oi Manawa, the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, which opened on the twenty-second of February twenty seventeen, the sixth anniversary of the quake. It takes the form of a curved wall clad in Italian Carrara marble, following the river's bend for more than one hundred metres, carrying the names of all one hundred and eighty-five people who died. Of those, one hundred and fifteen died in the collapse of a single building, the Canterbury Television building. Ngāi Tahu gifted the name Oi Manawa, which means the tremor, or quivering, of the heart. There is nothing to do here but read the names slowly.

Nearby, the walk carries the memory of the one hundred and eighty-five empty chairs, a community artwork by the local artist Peter Majendie. He first arranged one hundred and eighty-five white chairs of every kind, one for each person who died, on the twenty-second of February twenty twelve, inspired by Vincent van Gogh's paintings of empty chairs. On the first of April twenty twenty-three he closed the exhibition and invited people to take a chair home, so the field dispersed, one seat at a time, back into the community it was made to mourn.

Faith and colour built back

Recovery in Christchurch is not only stone. With the cathedral torn open, the Anglican diocese built a working cathedral out of some of the humblest materials imaginable and made it beautiful. The Transitional Cathedral, widely called the Cardboard Cathedral, opened on the sixth of August twenty thirteen. Designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban with the New Zealand firm Warren and Mahoney, it is built largely from ninety-eight great cardboard tubes, with timber, polycarbonate, and a base of shipping containers. It was meant to be temporary and has held a wounded city together for more than a decade.

Then the walk gives back some colour. New Regent Street, a terraced lane of Spanish Mission shopfronts painted in soft pastels, opened on the first of April nineteen thirty-two, during the Depression, built as a deliberate beacon of hope on the site of a former skating rink. After the earthquake the buildings were restored, and the heritage tram line down the middle of the lane reopened in November twenty thirteen. The walk closes at the Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings, designed by Benjamin Mountfort and built in stages between eighteen fifty-eight and eighteen sixty-five. Their Stone Chamber, one of the finest examples of High Victorian Gothic in the country, collapsed in the quake, and restoration continues in stages. These are the only purpose-built provincial government buildings still in existence in New Zealand, the last house of a form of government abolished in eighteen seventy-six.

The green spine that held

Through all of it, the garden city kept its green. The Botanic Gardens and Avon walk reads the willow-lined river from a memorial arch up the Gothic stone spine and into the gardens the city is named for. It starts at the Bridge of Remembrance, a stone arch over the Ōtākaro designed in nineteen twenty-one by the architect William Gummer and unveiled on the eleventh of November nineteen twenty-four, Armistice Day. Damaged in the earthquakes, it was rededicated on Anzac Day, the twenty-fifth of April twenty sixteen, making it a memorial twice over: to the soldiers who marched away, and to a city that had to rebuild the very stones that remembered them.

Upstream sit the Antigua Boat Sheds, a green-painted timber boatshed that opened in August eighteen eighty-two, listed by Heritage New Zealand as the only surviving nineteenth-century commercial boatshed on a river in New Zealand. Flat-bottomed punts are still poled along the Avon from here in the Edwardian manner. Up Rolleston Avenue rises the Arts Centre, Te Matatiki Toi Ora, a range of twenty-two Gothic Revival buildings that were once the University of Canterbury until it moved to Ilam in nineteen seventy-four. A young Ernest Rutherford studied here from eighteen ninety, doing early research in a basement den in the Clock Tower Building, preserved on site as Rutherford's Den. The precinct's restoration after the quake, worth around two hundred and ninety million dollars, is among the largest heritage rebuilds anywhere, done stone by numbered stone.

The walk passes Canterbury Museum, a grey basalt Gothic building by Mountfort that first opened on the first of October eighteen seventy around the collection of the geologist Julius von Haast, and Christ's College, the oldest independent school in New Zealand, whose Big School of eighteen sixty-three is the oldest educational building still in use in the country. Then the stone gives way to green. The Christchurch Botanic Gardens were founded in eighteen sixty-three within a loop of the river, beginning with a single English oak, the Albert Edward Oak, planted on the ninth of July that year for a royal wedding and still the oldest tree in the gardens. Around them stretches Hagley Park, created in eighteen fifty-five and reserved by law forever as public space, at about one hundred and sixty-five hectares larger than Hyde Park in London. A brand-new city on the plains locked open a vast green for everyone who would come after.

That is the through-line a self-guided walk lets you read: a planned English town on Ngāi Tahu Country that reached for permanence, lost its heart in ninety seconds, and has spent more than a decade putting the stone back while the garden held. See both walks on the Christchurch walking tours hub and take them at your own pace.

Sources

• Christchurch Cathedral Square rebuild self-guided tour, Roamer (fact-audited transcript).
• Christchurch Botanic Gardens and Avon self-guided tour, Roamer (fact-audited transcript).
• Oi Manawa, Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, Christchurch City Council memorial records.
• Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga listings for ChristChurch Cathedral, New Regent Street, the Provincial Council Buildings, the Antigua Boat Sheds and the Bridge of Remembrance.
• Te Ara, the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, on Benjamin Mountfort and the Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings.