Thames street named nation’s best
Award recognition of community ownership
Mary St in Thames was named the Best Street at the Keep New Zealand Beautiful Awards ceremony in Wellington. The Best Street Award, sponsored by Resene, recognises and celebrates a street in New Zealand that clearly stands out for its beauty, cleanliness, plantings and sense of community pride.
“We’re really excited about the award,” says Strat Peters, chairman of Thames Community Board.
“It’s a recognition of the community ownership of the Create the Vibe space. We’d like to thank and acknowledge the Thames community for being so involved in shaping the public space, for painting the planters and making creative use of the space to hold events.
“We’d also like to thank Thames artists Kylie Gunn and Rick Fisher for their murals and Auckland mural artist Erika Pearce and Waka Kotahi NZTA for their 90 per cent funding of the project cost through the Innovating Streets pilot programme.”
Thames Community Board budgets made up the remaining 10
per cent of the overall $355,000 project cost.
The partial Mary Street closure to traffic for the Create the Vibe space is a trial closure. The materials used in the public space have about a twoyear lifespan and Thamescoromandel District Council says these can be easily moved or removed.
“As the pedestrian area was created in March 2021, we’re seeing how the space functions over a full year and will evaluate its use and effect on vehicle traffic at the end of March 2022,” says Strat.
Mary St has been temporarily closed to vehicles at the intersection with Pollen St for the half block running west to the service lanes towards Queen St. Access to the ANZ car park is from Mary St.
A 2020 ‘Design Factory NZ’ project by Wintec students found people had similar views on the CBD’S maintenance and upkeep saying that
if it looked and felt nicer, it would be more inviting .
Some ideas were : having an incentive for business to take care of their shop fronts, to have a designer put ideas forward on how to get things looking more tasteful and calling on correct signage throughout the CBD so people can find things.
“We heard about a lot of tourist spots that had no
signs or information provided so it made them difficult to find . Even directing people /traffic to the main street could prove to be helpful,” the group reported.
Top ideas from surveys were to upgrade the Thames website, host outdoor movie nights and security patrols.
Creating a night-time ‘vibe’ in the town was also a big focus, with the top idea from the project being the Thames Light Up idea to add atmosphere and safety to the Thames after the sun goes down.
“It also provides some aesthetic improvements to the CBD to lift the vibe. This means updating the town’s lighting down the main St, adding LED / fairy lights to be strung throughout the Main St, and also using specific lights to activate
the historic buildings throughout Thames CBD,” the project concluded.