I love Wellington, but its golden age as a hub of creativity is over
If you’re looking for the next Peter Jackson, or even the next Taika, Bret or Jemaine, you’re probably not going to find them in Wellington.
There’s been a lot of conversation recently about Wellington not being a great place to live – and how to get back to that golden decade that stretched from the 1990s to the early 2000s.
In the late 1980s, Wellington city was an absolute mess. The sharemarket crash had ripped the guts out of New Zealand’s speculative wealth and the property developers who had been knocking down the central city were stopped in their tracks.
Over on the south edge of the CBD, a rumoured ‘‘bypass’’ was mired in red tape. But the NZTA had been buying up buildings along the route for years. It was all earmarked for demolition and most of those buildings were wrecks that today would be boarded up.
But back then, if you ‘‘knew someone’’, it was still possible to find an old warehouse and rent it at far below ‘‘market rates’’.
All over the city, there were similar little islands of neglect and opportunity. If you didn’t mind shovelling your way through half-a-metre of pigeon shit to find the floor, then there was cheap, central, industrial space to be had.
And the situation was similar for flatting. The ‘‘nice’’ folks were up in Kelburn, Khandallah and Karori – forever known as ‘‘the KKK’’ – while us feral scum who were doing the interesting work and keeping what there was of the city’s nightlife going, mostly congregated in cheap digs around Newtown, Te Aro and the lower slopes of Mt Victoria.
In other words, conditions were perfect for an explosion of art, film and music-making that would be known around the world a few years later.
A dozen bands who could shake the teeth out of your mouth came out of those few square kilometres.
And so did a lot of what turned up in Peter Jackson’s earliest films. Bad Taste was mostly shot in daylight, around Pukerua Bay. But Jackson’s Meet The Feebles (1989) and Braindead (1992) – perhaps his best work – couldn’t have been made except in an affordable, diverse city.
To feed and lubricate all this urban creativity, a generation of coffee roasters, chefs and hospitality legends rose up, took over affordable spaces up and down Cuba St and created a retail and entertainment culture that New Zealand hadn’t seen in a generation.
And within a few years, as this generation of entrepreneurs grew up, the films got pricier and money started flowing back into the economy, Wellington was all set for a golden age. Which, of course, couldn’t last.
In the wake of every golden era, gentrification, legislation and landlords’ profiteering always turn up and smother the very thing they were hoping to exploit.
Today, there are amazing hubs of creativity being nurtured by private enterprise out in Miramar and beyond. But city wide, this place will never be the same.
I still live here and I still love it. But no amount of planning is ever going to recreate the conditions that created the legend of the ‘‘coolest little capital’’.
Quite the opposite.