Christchurch

The largest city of the South Island, laid out as a planned English settlement on the flat Canterbury plains in the eighteen fifties and long the most English of New Zealand's cities, a garden city of stone spires and the willow-lined Avon. In February two thousand eleven a great earthquake struck, killing one hundred and eighty-five people and shattering the centre, and much of the old city came down, its cathedral among it. The years since have been a slow and remarkable rebuild: a transitional cathedral, quiet memorials to the dead, a street of pastel shops restored, and gardens and river kept green through it all. Read the garden city and its rebuilding, from Cathedral Square to the botanic gardens on the Avon, at your own pace.