Reading’s reopening will ‘rejuvenate’ area: Prendergast
Former Wellington mayor Dame Kerry Prendergast has endorsed current mayor Tory Whanau’s claims that reopening the Reading complex will rejuvenate the inner-city stretch.
Prendergast did not want to talk about the structure of the deal – which will likely see Wellington
City Council buy the land off the Reading company for $32 million on the agreement it fixes and reopens the complex – but was able to speak about what reopening could do for Courtenay Place.
“It will have a rejuvenating surely needs it,” she said.
The building abruptly closed in 2019 after a report raised earthquake fears.
Prendergast was a city councillor from 1989, then deputy mayor from 1995 until becoming mayor from 2001 to 2010. That gave her a seat around the council table from the long period that the large Courtenay Place site was empty, to when Reading bought it in the late 1990s and built its complex. She opened the facility as mayor in 2002.
Back then, the new complex “connected” the strip from Taranaki St through to the Embassy Theatre. “At the moment, that particular part is dead,” she said.
The new complex, which was effect, it consistently busy in the theatre and downstairs shopping area, created thoroughfares from Courtenay Place to Wakefield St, she said.
But Prendergast imagined Reading, as it considered how to rebuild, would “read the tea leaves and see big screens are no longer the answer” in a Netflix era. She believed a market area on the ground floor, inviting people to the cinemas upstairs, would work.
Lifelong Wellingtonian Chris Wilkinson, a managing director at retail strategists First Retail Group, was not certain the council had made a good deal with Reading, as it was investing public money based on limited certainty of the outcome.
The council would have been better to accept an offer from philanthropist Sir Mark Dunajtschik, who offered to put up his own money to buy the land with the resulting funds going to charity, before the land was eventually being gifted back to the city. The council rejected that offer.
“There is a lot of reliance on what we know now delivering in the future.”
His company had been involved in ambitious council projects outside Wellington, but these tended to have more funding from other sources.
The opening of Reading in 2002 gave the clear signal to nearby building owners that they could reinvest in their own properties, leading to a revival of the Courtenay Place area.
It was impossible to say whether it could do the same again.
In late February, Whanau publicly released already-leaked details of the Reading deal, confirming the council would buy the land under the cinema from Reading for $32m, then lease it back to the company on the agreement it would pay an amount that covered costs.
Reading would have the option to buy back the land at $32m in the first 10 years.
Whanau said the deal was cost-neutral to ratepayers and, on LinkedIn, she posted that it would result in “tens of millions of dollars invested by Reading into a dynamic, redeveloped centre, featuring a state-ofthe-art cinema, with a variety of dining and entertainment options”.