Posts by Hebe
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Islander,
Investors rather than owner-occupiers.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Sacha,
One hope I have is that Christchurch might just begin to reflect the pre-Pakeha 800 years or so years of settlement in some small ways. I'm not holding my breath though. While we're at it, we could call some of these new subdivisions by names that reflect the Maori heritage rather than the repulsively anodyne Stepford-type names we get at present down here.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Islander,
Vassars were, for some reason, For Grown-Ups. Pink mice with pinched ears and angelica tails and cinnamon bars and acid drops were Mary Gray for me.
Chancery Lane with that coffee shop; speaking of which the Albatross, the Victorian, the Mousetrap building in Oxford Terrace and the place in High Street that sent the orders on a wire out to the kitchen, and the coffee shop with the big red roaster in Cashel Street, and the DIC and and and...moving on into the 70s Mollett St, the Mykonos, the first Dux, Smiths bookshop, the Hong Kong Cafe, and the real Hop Yip Chong (spelling?)
Time for a lie-down.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
I regret that I never pushed along my children to go up the Anglican Cathedral spire; there was always "another day" because it had "always" been there for me. I loved tthe inside of that church though, it was just beautiful and worn in and kind of Arts and Crafts-y. I did get to run loose in the Basilica with a camera a few years ago, and I found that building impressive rather than uplifting. (the basilica in picture above because we were talking of spiral staircases)
It's not those big landmarks that are the most important to me, one was the dome on the old Regent Theatre, and Java coffee shop (gone) and the Curator's House in the gardens (still there) where I spent many days of my childhood with close rellies.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Good point that about human construction; I really really miss the natural assets like the Port Hills walks and the clean wild beaches like Southshore. Now they are stinking wild beaches.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
That your work Joe? Great but sad.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Just thinking,
Antony Gough, who owns most of the Strip in this morning's Press: The rebuild would be expensive, with the sandy riverside land requiring 16 metre-deep pile foundations for even a one-storey building, he said.
Implying that a good slice of the central city will have the same building constraints and expense. So then where are the profits that any savvy investor would be looking for?
That's why I think a "rebuild" of the CBD is not going to happen, rather a reinvention and reimagining of that area of Christchurch is called for because in the great game of property poker the big investors will not come until there is a customer base to support them, and the customers won't come until there are reasons to come to the central city. Ballantynes, Scorpio and few shoe and dress shops are not enough.
I notice around the city that we still have the trees and big sky, and they go a long way to keeping the "feel" of the place -- Risingholme Park is my local and its as Christchurch as it ever was, ditto Riccarton Bush. I'm concerned about retaining and improving the "feel" of the whole city. Kevin McCloud of Grand Designs put it better than I can in Sacha's link to Campbell Live interview when he spoke of Hausmann's Paris and the seven-storey human scale being important.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Sacha,
Yes. Groan. But for my own sanity I try to keep looking for the noble side of human nature in all this.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Just thinking,
New Zealand will survive the Canterbury Quakes but will Christchurch?
Christchurch will survive, but not in its old physical form and with its old power structure. Most of us are doing quite fine without the CBD now; we've adapted with varying sorts and degrees of inconvenience and loss along the way.
And the influx of money to come into the city over the next 20 years from the foreign reinsurers' bank accounts and NZ government cash will give the city a large economic boost -- though I fear that on the whole the locals will get the trickle-down at the level of labouring jobs while the big profits go to the players in the construction industry and land developers. The question is how long it will be before that flow-through starts, and how many people will have to leave in order to survive; that depends on the insurers.
The demographics of Christchurch are changing already: skilled younger people are moving in and retireds are moving out or planning to. So that will be interesting.
I had hoped that the silver lining of the Nats being in power would be that at least we had a PM and Finance Minister who could speak the insurers' language and would put cutting a deal with them at the forefront of their operations in the recovery effort. I am sorely disappointed in that; National has literally sold the red zoners down the river.
I don't think Christchurch will die; and it will depend on which village hub you live in how you view the city; we residents no longer have common experiences in our day-to-day lives. The CBD has died as was; it's matter of reinvention not rebuild.
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Southerly: Tower Insurance Have Some Bad…, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Hebe:
No idea what you mean by that, any suggestion of malice on my part is ill-founded. All the best in your troublesDamn done it again; not getting at you. Just that straight after my post last night life got rocky and I'm not able to engage in incisive, debate-adding posts today. I do agree with you in more ways than not; one of the tragedies has been the way good people with valid ideas have been shut out of the recovery "loop' because they have divergent political views to the Govt and council (Cosgrove being a prime example).
