The second coming
Discover how Christchurch has been transformed
On my first night wandering the streets of Christchurch, New Zealand’s largest South Island city, I stumble on an improbable creation. At the edge of a car park there’s a coin-operated washing machine beside a makeshift dance floor – and it has a name: the Dance-O-Mat. I pop $2 in the slot, wait as four speakers roar to life with The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights, then dance like no-one’s watching – an unlikely proposition in a city that’s spent the past decade reinventing neighbourhoods and luring people with pedestrian precincts, wellness hubs, bustling food markets and street activations like my impromptu dance studio (the brainchild of creative urban regeneration group Gap Filler).
It may be fringed by the Southern Alps but Christchurch bears little resemblance to the wild and beautiful New Zealand that most people know. Once relegated by tourists to a transit stop before the ski resorts of Queenstown or a luxury lodge nestled in the spectacular wilderness, Christchurch has been reborn in recent years, emerging as a phoenix with hipster stylings.
Its metamorphosis was a necessity – two devastating earthquakes destroyed much of the city’s Victorian heritage in 2010 and 2011 and created uninhabitable “red zones”. Ten years on, the experiment of an entire city as an urban-renewal project has yielded a forest of green shoots. Neglected industrial zones have been recast into vibrant neighbourhoods where classic and modern architecture rub shoulders; linear parks and laneways buzz with after-work locals.
“The first thing a lot of people did after the earthquakes was leave,” says bartender MJ at Welles Street (wellesstreet.co.nz), a CBD pub and eatery. He’s serving schooners of local lager to the thirsty crowd watching hometown Super Rugby heroes the Crusaders defeat the Australian Brumbies. “It was pretty grim for a few years but there were low rents, for obvious reasons, and out of that a whole bunch of new operators decided to take a chance. It’s a totally different place now.”
Opened in a converted warehouse in 2017, Welles Street is in the South Town precinct, which in just a few years has shaken off its rusty industrial image to become Christchurch’s most happening precinct. “You would have been pretty mad to open here before the quakes,” says MJ. “Now it’s where everyone wants to go.” I carry my Margarita to the pub’s leafy streetfacing atrium and as if on cue a seemingly endless supply of urbanites walk by.
New Zealand’s oldest city (it dates back to 1850 when the first four ships of European settlers dropped anchor nearby), Christchurch is also its most English, easily explored by foot and on water. The next morning, I spend a lazy half an hour taking a flat-bottomed punt along the crystal-clear waters of the Avon River, which meanders through the city centre. On its banks people wave from walking paths, while joggers overtake me, puffing across the gorgeous green expanse of Hagley Park and
Christchurch Botanic Gardens, the home of an oak tree grown from acorns sent by Queen Victoria in 1861.
But it’s not this history that makes a lasting impression; instead it’s the spirit, reminiscent of a post-Wall Berlin, of a city electrified by innovative ideas as it moves on from its past. Street art has become the lifeblood of Christchurch. In the difficult years immediately after the earthquakes, local and international aerosol artists were invited to create moments of joy amid the crumbling concrete landscape. The result is a city that feels like an open-air gallery, with bright murals knitting the urban fabric. My meandering is richly rewarded when I spot Jacob Root’s Breakfast at Tiffany’sera Audrey Hepburn doing her soigné thing alongside the words “Shine so bright”. Owen Dippie’s family of elephants bursting through a wall is around the corner and, 100 metres on, I arrive at a surrealist Alice in Wonderland tableau by local artist Jacob Yikes. I channel Alice when I realise the street art has made me wander off course. “We’re lost!” I exclaim to my partner, who replies with a newly adopted Kiwi chill, “Who cares?”
Those bright pops of colour against the grey concrete landscape aren’t the only thing embracing the idea of impermanence. Three blocks away on Latimer Square, I find the “Cardboard Cathedral” – official name: the Christchurch Transitional Cathedral. As the nickname suggests, the structure boldly reimagines post-quake architecture with an A-shaped roof made in part from cardboard cylinders, designed to last only 50 years. Why so short? It’s the temporary replacement for the 140-year-old bluestone ChristChurch Cathedral, which remains a potent symbol of the city despite being cordoned off after being severely damaged in the 2011 quake.
Making like a local, I grab one of the electric scooters that are for hire on almost every street corner and whizz to the Riverside Market (riverside.nz), the permanent replacement for the Re:Start Container Mall, which was constructed from shipping containers in a manic six-month building blitz to jump-start the downtown revival in late 2011. Visit the area now and you’ll find a timber, glass and steel structure enclosing its own laneways and a lively mix of fresh food stalls, eateries of all ethnic denominations and a cluster of coffee shops and bars. Plus, as the young woman manning the Aha Wildlife Bakery (ahawildlifebakery.com) tells me, “There’s nowhere else you can eat our national bird,” as she points to the kiwi-shaped pretzels on display.
“Before the earthquakes, Christchurch was in danger of losing its soul,” says Nicole Elwood, whose company Crater Rim Walks (craterrimwalks.co.nz) takes visitors to explore the spectacular volcanic Port Hills that separate the city from the port of Lyttelton. “People were going to the new shopping malls and the city centre was hollowing out. It’s really given us the opportunity to rebuild it better.”
The short drive to the Port Hills – “the locals’ playground”, Elwood tells me – passes through the eerie former suburb of Avonside. After it was declared a red zone, its residents were relocated and their houses demolished, never to be replaced. Now, the formerly well-tended home gardens have flourished into an urban jungle where people from all over the city go foraging (albeit against government restrictions). “They call it red zoning – collecting the surplus fruit and vegetables from that area to take home and eat.”
No city is ever complete but, as Christchurch knows, therein lies the opportunity. That night, standing on a balcony at CBD rooftop bar Mr. Brightside (mrbrightside.co.nz), I watch the sun go down over the Southern Alps and notice giant neon letters slowly emerge out of the gathering dark. Attached to the side of the Christchurch Art Gallery comes the message that sums up this surprising city perfectly: “Everything is going to be alright.”