For 135 years Lyttelton residents and visitors to the port settlement have looked up to the spur above Officers Point and seen the Timeball Station.

Now, the visual reality of the seismic activity that has rocked Canterbury since 4 September 2010 is plain to see.  Work on dismantling the Timeball Station began in June.  Now, much of the iconic landmark’s heritage fabric has been removed and put into storage.  Save for the former wash-house there is little in the way of recognisable features of what previously stood.

These are sad times for Timeball Station Manager Jan Titus, other Timeball staff and the wider Lyttelton community who share the sense of loss of the world-famous landmark with the New Zealand Historic Places Trust.  The site closed following the 4 September earthquake last year, with many chattels removed at the time.  Extensive damage from the 22 February quake compounded the earlier damage, leading to dismantling as the only option.

On 13 June successive quakes resulted in the tower collapsing as dismantling continued.

For Jan it literally is a case of picking up the pieces and carrying on.  While looking ahead to a time when the Timeball Station returns in some form seems some time away, it is motivation to keep on going.

“I don’t know what to say really,” Jan muses as she stands on the floorboards in what was the Timeball Station kitchen.

“It has been cold and our staff have had to work under trying conditions to ensure as much of the Timeball Station fabric is retrieved so that it could potentially be returned to the site.  Like many people in Lyttelton and Canterbury we face the same issues in dealing with our personal situations as well as working towards achieving the best results at the Timeball Station.

“We are recording what comes off the site and goes into storage facilities.  We label every item so that it can be easily retrieved once a final decision is made on the site’s future.

“There are lots of pieces of timber, brick, walls, windows, pieces of roof.  There’s tonnes of stuff that’s broken but we are trying to retain and record what we can.  It’s progressively getting difficult to work out what piece is what and where it belongs now.”

Once the site is cleared the damaged retaining wall will be made safe.

“It would be great to initially establish it as a green site so the people of Lyttelton and visitors can come up here and use it again.  With summer coming it’s a great place to come with a picnic and enjoy the activity and beautiful views of the harbour,” Jan says.

“There is a huge local desire to see the timeball mechanism return in some form.”

The NZHPT has created a Timeball Station Facebook page for information on the dismantling work of the Lyttelton landmark.  The history of the Timeball Station can be read on the NZHPT’s website or on the Register Online