The big plans for Wellington that never happened
Dreams of gondolas, light rail, aquariums and a high-rise Johnsonville Mall have never eventuated. Why do our flashiest artist impressions never become reality? Erin Gourley reports
Picture this: A gondola from Oriental Bay to Mt Victoria. Sir Peter Jackson’s film museum in Tākina. Light rail to the southern suburbs. A covered concert venue seating 12,000 people on the waterfront. High-rise apartments under construction above a redeveloped Johnsonville Mall.
That could be Wellington if decades of public and private ambitions had become reality. Instead, the city is brimming with plans that never were – blocked by the courts, ditched due to budgetary constraints or bogged down in politics.
Residents are left with a pile of blueprints and dated artist’s impressions but have seen very little change on the ground. “Big plans are possibly doomed to fail,” said councillor Iona Pannett, who has been on council while both the council itself and private developers announced plan after plan to revitalise the arts sector, the sports sector, or change the way Wellingtonians travel.
As a long-time campaigner against the Basin Flyover – an elevated state highway near the Basin Reserve, killed off in court in 2015 – Pannett knows about big projects meeting their demise.
It wasn’t just community opposition but meeting financial challenges and sustaining momentum over a number of years that slowed progress. “We’re full of really great ideas, but it takes a lot to get them over the line,” she said.
The city has not stagnated forever. Some big plans worked out beautifully in the 20th century. It’s hard to imagine Wellington with no man-made beach at Oriental Bay and no pedestrian mall on Cuba St. But in recent years, it feels like more projects have been cancelled than have gone ahead.
Last year saw the demise of two projects Wellington has talked about for decades: a development at Shelly Bay and a light rail route from the city centre to the southern suburbs.
So can residents ever trust that a pretty artist’s impression will become reality? Pannett pointed out that in the current financial environment, the council wouldn’t be developing many flashy plans. The focus was on the much less glamorous core infrastructure.
The past is rich with ambitious plans that never were. Fireworks illuminate the night sky in a 2018 render of an indoor arena on the city’s waterfront.
Plans for the covered concert venue there were included a
2013 document titled “8 Big Ideas” for Wellington’s economic growth, describing it as a venue that would “attract headline acts and more visitors”.
The project was close to reality in 2018 when a location was selected and the artist’s impressions of a sleek concert arena seating 12,500 people were released, complete with fireworks in the background. But a few years later, a familiar problem arose: Covid-19. The council’s revenues were down and it was facing other issues, such as expensive earthquake-strengthening bills.
The project “ran out of steam”, Pannett said, and was no longer a priority. In 2021, the council dropped the plan and reallocated the project’s $45 million budget into earthquake strengthening.
Not all the council’s “Big Ideas” have been set aside. Encouraging the shift towards active transport like walking and cycling remains a focus, with the rollout of the cycleway network continuing at a rapid pace.
Number one on the list was a film museum as a “high-quality tourist attraction”, which would celebrate the contribution of the film sector to the city.
Sir Peter Jackson made a deal with the council in 2016, with then-deputy mayor Justin Lester talking the idea up as a “Disneyland” for the city. The council had wanted to combine its new convention centre with the movie museum.
The idea was on unstable ground
from the outset. Jackson questioned whether the combined convention centre and movie museum was workable, and complained about the ever-expanding space required by the convention centre at the expense of the museum.
Another two years of planning went into the building before both parties realised it wouldn’t work out, jointly announcing a “mutuallyagreed parting of the ways” in 2018.
The council forged on to build Tākina on the site – the new convention centre, which opened in 2023.
Jackson remained committed to building his museum and it looks like it might finally be on the cards. The movie mogul bought up a block of Lyall Bay land at the end of last year, rumoured to be the site.
Another plan floating in the ether of council plans for at least a decade has been “daylighting” the capital’s streams. The proposal would simultaneously beautify the city, encourage native wildlife to return, and taking pressure off water infrastructure by diverting stormwater.
Mayor Tory Whanau made daylighting streams to “restore natural beauty and habitat” part of her campaign platform at the 2022 local body election.
“Daylighting streams is a fantastic idea but complicated work in Wellington specifically,”
Whanau said. “Most streams diagonally cross the city so would require bridges to be built and work on buildings to daylight them fully.”
Partial daylighting could be worth a look, Whanau said. Even in the slashed-back draft of the Long-Term Plan is a $50,000 budget to improve water resilience through a blue network plan.
In happier financial times there was no shortage of grand plans for the city.
Controversial ideas for the waterfront included a casino, apartments and a shopping mall. Ice rinks were planned in Lower Hutt and ski slopes in Porirua. The plan for redeveloping Shelly Bay was compared to San Francisco. An earthquake strengthening option for the Opera House a decade ago would have seen the building encased in glass.
In 2004, not one but two companies were planning to set up hovercraft travel along the Hutt River – there was a planned commuter route down the Hutt River as well as a tourist route through the harbour.
Businessman Wayne Coffey even purchased a hovercraft, which was parked up on Petone Beach for years as the company ran trials and tried to get it approved for a tourist route from Petone to Queen’s Wharf.
The plan fell over because of red tape and Wellington’s windy conditions. The hovercraft, which had been specially brought over from
Canada, is now in Fiji.
Another ambitious plan in the 2000s was for a $20m aquarium on the south coast. The council approved the plans, but controversy raged about whether the aquarium plus cafe was appropriate for the pristine natural environment.
Eventually, in 2009, the Environment Court decided the plan could not go ahead and the grand aquarium plan was trimmed down into the smaller Island Bay Marine Education Centre.
Just last year an Austrian ski lift company made its pitch for gondolas as a mode of public transport around our hilly city – including routes from the airport, Island Bay, Karori and from Wainuiomata to Lower Hutt.
In the 1990s businessman Rex Nicholls wanted to set up a gondola from Oriental Bay to Mt Victoria, but it never went ahead over concerns that it would interfere with protection of the green space in the Town Belt.
Rongotai MP Julie Anne Genter said gondolas were not such a crazy idea, especially on particularly hilly routes, but the focus should be on the real project Wellington needs.
Light rail should be the priority, she said. Her party, the Greens, had been pushing for a light rail route in Wellington since the 1990s and Genter was confident it would end up in Wellington at some point.
“There are cities the size of Wellington that have seven light rail lines in other countries and it works. There has been a failure to execute the delivery, in part because of status quo bias in transport agencies and a lack of central government leadership and clarity.”
Genter believed the issue could be solved if cities like Wellington had autonomy over how to use the transport funding at a local level, rather than having to rely on central government. Some plans to reinvigorate suburbs were so on-again, off-again that councillors have doubted whether the owners ever wanted it to happen.
The Johnsonville Mall upgrade, first announced as a $200m project right before the global financial crisis (GFC), has either been plagued by the worst luck in the world or is never going to happen.
First it was the GFC; then it was the Kaikōura earthquake; then a third upgrade foundered when the Covid-19 pandemic hit.
Ohariu MP Greg O’Connor did not believe the mall’s owners, Stride Property Group, wanted an upgrade to happen. Or at least, the New Zealand half of their operation does.
“I have been confident before things will happen and then it hasn’t. But it does need to happen.”
Community frustration with the shopping centre has been so great that councillors have even discussed compulsory acquisition of the land.
Stride senior development manager Jarrod Thompson said the redevelopment was “subject to market conditions” and said the “macro-economic environment” was causing widespread disruption.
“We are actively working on a multi-use precinct that is consistent with the recently released Wellington City Council Proposed District Plan that we believe will reinvigorate Johnsonville into the future,” Thompson said.
Development plans would be shared with the wider community once they were finalised with support of stakeholders. If new plans are created, that would be the fourth set of promises about the Johnsonville Mall since the mid-2000s.
Wellington Central MP Tamatha Paul promises one long-awaited plan will bear fruit this year. During her time as a councillor for the central city, she worked hard for a mid-sized independent music venue and said the arrangements were close to paying off. Council reports on the arts have long identified a gap in the city’s music and performance venues for a space holding around 1000 people.
She said a new venue, capable of holding up to 1200 people, would be opening up this year and would be “independent and great”.