Publications

Heritage New Zealand Magazine Magazine Request Winter 2008 Autumn 2008 Summer 2007 Spring 2007 Winter 2007 Autumn 2007 Summer 2006 Spring 2006 Winter 2006 Autumn 2006 Summer 2005 Spring 2005 Winter 2005 50th Anniversary commemorative issue Autumn 2005 Summer 2004 Spring 2004 Winter 2004 Autumn 2004 Summer 2003 Spring 2003 Winter 2003 Autumn 2003 Summer 2002 Spring 2002 NZ Historic Places Magazine May 2002 February 2002 November 2001 August 2001 May 2001 February 2001 November 2000 August 2000 May 2000 February 2000

Membership of the Historic Places Trust entitles you to a range of unique benefits including a free subscription to Heritage New Zealand magazine.

From issue: Spring 2004

Beyond the Façade

by Peter Calder

A restoration plan for Auckland's Britomart heritage area has finally been adopted. Peter Calder looks beneath the surface

Britomart buildings from the rear. Image: Sait Akkirman

Auckland's future will make peace with its demolition-happy past on the waterfront, where a $350 million heritage development will restore and revitalise a part of the city that has been among its seediest areas for more than 30 years.

Chief Post Office. Image: Sait Akkirman

The Britomart Transport Centre, which opened amid much fanfare in July 2003, made a railway station of the old Chief Post Office (CPO), bringing rail passengers to the foot of Queen Street for the first time since 1930, when the Beach Road station was opened.

On aesthetic and architectural grounds, the redevelopment has already been widely adjudged magnificent, even if its first-rate transport centre is in the service of a third-rate transport system. But it is just the beginning of a massive urban renewal project that
takes in the entire block bounded by QEII Square,Customs Street East, Britomart Place and Quay Street.

Northern Steamship Co. Image: Sait Akkirman

The area's history is written in the stone of the buildings near its waterfront. These are the headquarters of prosperous traders and prominent citizens - Levy, Barrington, Stanbeth, Nathan - whose import and export, grocery and chandlery businesses depended on proximity to the port. Other buildings' names are rich with the smell of the sea: the Union Fish Company (this was a restaurant fitted into the old Harbour Board workshop) and the Northern Steamship Company.

Wharf Police Building. Image: Sait Akkirman

In fact, the sea itself is closer than it appears, since the whole development stands on reclaimed land. The 1840s pedestrian, standing on Lower Albert Street and looking eastwards, could gaze upon a large reach of water between Britomart Place - the short street that runs down to Quay Street from the end of Customs Street East - and the Hobson Street ridge.

The foreshore of the day - which remained in place until the major land reclamations of the 1880s - may still be discerned from the curve of Fort Street, which joined into Shortland Street and ran around to meet Fanshawe Street in the west.The prosaic names of the intervening bays - Mechanics, which survives, and Official and Commercial either side of Point Britomart - remind us that the waterfront was no leisure precinct but the place where hard work and commerce were carried on in the keen new dominion.

NZ Harbour Board Employees Union buildings. Image: Sait Akkirman

Like most cities' waterfronts around the world, Auckland's saw dramatic changes of fortune last century, turning from bustling commercial centre to seedy dockside slum before being reinvented. The area between Customs and Quay Streets went through hard times as the city's suburban hinterland opened up and the commercial centre moved uptown. Even the 1960s refurbishment of QEII Square and the bus terminal did little to lift its image, and the warren of streets behind the CPO were among the city's least salubrious. As the Viaduct Harbour development went ahead to the west, political wrangles over concept, design and finance kept the Britomart area mired in its past.

Northern Steamship Company. Image: Sait Akkirman

All that is set to change: the Britomart Above Ground Development will restore 17 heritage buildings - 10 of them registered by the Historic Places Trust and listed by Auckland City - to their Victorian and Edwardian glory while preparing the interiors to accommodate upscale retail and residential tenants in 21st-century comfort. The upper floors of the old CPO will be outfitted and occupied by this time next year and, one by one, the heritage buildings will be refurbished.

Levy Building Image: Sait Akkirman

The Barrington Building, Sofrana House and Levy Building (respectively 10, 14 and 20 Customs Street, next to the Mercure Hotel) will be the first to be renovated. The first two will be converted into a heritage boutique hotel by the end of next year and the Levy Building will become a boutique office building. Work will also begin shortly on turning the Wharf Police Station at the other end of Britomart into a restaurant. The whole development is likely to be finished within five to eight years, although the contract gives the developer, Bluewater Consortium, 11 years before penalty clauses kick in. Meanwhile, the perimeter of heritage refurbishment will enclose a pedestrian-friendly precinct of six new buildings, including hotels, apartments, offices, shops and restaurants. The precinct was the vision of Californian architect Mario Madayag, whose proposal, overseen by the development architects Jasmax, was favoured from among seven finalists chosen from 153 put up for the precinct. Narrow lanes and a large public square will create an "urban village", which, its promoters hope, will be a busy "people place" 24 hours a day.

Excelsior House. Image: Sait Akkirman

The contract for the redevelopment was the subject of fiercely competitive bidding and was eventually signed with Bluewater, headed by expatriate billionaire property developer Peter Cooper, whose last job in New Zealand was as managing director of LD Nathan. Cooper has prospered in mixed-use property development in North America. Under the deal, the council will be paid $28 million for 150-year leases on the historic buildings and renewable 50-year leases on the new buildings.

Harbour Board Workshop Buildings (Union Fish Co.) Picture: Sait Akkirman

In committing itself to the project, Auckland - aided in large part by the determination of the Historic Places Trust - is paddling against the tide of its recent history,when the city trembled to the thunder of the wrecking ball. Investment companies, fresh from sharemarket triumphs, exulted in the power that their sudden riches conferred by demolishing huge slabs of our heritage.

"I'd like to think we have learned something," says David Reynolds, the Historic Places Trust's Auckland area co-ordinator. He and Richard Bollard, the Trust's heritage adviser, have watched and waited as the property owners of downtown Auckland have slowly come to their senses about what they were losing.

"There are newer, younger owners now, who remember how they saw their heritage slipping away - and they've got the money to spend," says Reynolds. "We meet with them on a regular basis and they're sympathetic.They're a different breed from the big old companies we used to be up against."

Entrican Building (Australis House). Image: Sait Akkirman

The change in consciousness has been reflected by a change in legislation.The passage of the Resource Management Act in 1991 suddenly made the Trust an affected party, explains Reynolds. "This meant that if the building was scheduled in the district plan and/or registered by the Trust, the Trust's consent was needed when it came to alterations. It meant the Trust that used to be an advocacy and influencing body suddenly found itself around the table. It's made a huge difference.

"Back in the 1980s, you spent most of your time pushing the unmentionable uphill, talking to people who, if you were lucky, would humour you and give you a cup of tea before carrying on and doing exactly what they wanted to do."

"It's a whole new landscape now," adds Bollard."It's my personal view that the increase in the number of people actually living in the city or staying in the numerous backpackers accommodation has been the saviour of old buildings.Many of the buildings have been taken up by very sympathetic tenants who have restored plaster ceilings, restored panelling. They have brought with them an appreciation of what heritage buildings mean to the city."

In the years since the demolition boom, the Trust and the city council have got into step in their system of regulations and covenants that guarantee the preservation of heritage buildings. The Trust's register and the council's schedule employ similar classification criteria - sometimes identical wording - and, Bollard explains, council and Trust officers usually visit buildings together with developers and architects, which lessens the chance that one will be played off against the other by developers keen to cut corners.

The change in our urban culture - both what happens in the city and how the citizens think about it - underpins the next stage of the Britomart development.And it is, by any sensible reckoning, a great improvement on what might have been.The plans for the area during the mayoralty of Les Mills were for a $1.5 billion forest of Singapore-style skyscrapers, which horrified even the normally gung-ho property development sector of the day; there were dire warnings of cost blowouts, and many voices were raised against what was seen as inappropriate overdevelopment of the area. A change of council at the local body elections saw Christine Fletcher elected as mayor, largely on a platform of stopping the plan.

Ian Grant, the specialist senior architect planner for Auckland City, reckons the megaplan would never have got off the ground - or more correctly into the ground - in any case. It was defeated politically, he explains,"but the reality is that it was never going to work. The [financial] numbers didn't stack up, but more importantly you were dealing with a substratum of fill on reclaimed land. It's been hard enough building a two-level railway station; the idea of building multilevel towers was just never going to be practicable."

The new plan, he explains, connects the future to the past.

"You can keep a lot of heritage value and at the same time get a lot of amenity value from very appropriate adaptive re-use. Part of the skill of the designers is working with what you've got and making the most of it. It helps people recognise where they've come from and builds upon that."

Aucklanders sceptical about the plans for Britomart Above Ground can be encouraged by what has happened in the old CPO. The magnificent restoration, which allows a view of the past (check out the exposed, original skeletal bolted joints at the bottom of the main pillars) exploits the finest features of the old banking chamber, such as the stained glass dome and the original jarrah floor.More impressive is the attention to questions of scale. The transport centre has to function as a corridor, funneling passengers from trains through to the city and the buses beyond (the numbers may be small now, but the station has to be futureproof in case the region ever gets serious about public transport).

But it needs to be a public space as well.What has been achieved - and it's something of a triumph given that it resulted from committee discussions involving all the stakeholders - is a quiet island in a busy space. It's easy to have a whispered conversation in the café as commuters stream past, which has to impress anyone familiar with European railway stations.

The challenge for the Britomart developers - and for the officers of council, which retains veto power over the development each step of the way - is to marry the needs of 21st-century tenants with the demands of district plan rules and conservation plans that place strict controls on what may be done. One of the more obvious difficulties is to do with seismic strengthening. This may not seem necessary in a city far from the country's main faultlines, but the fact that the whole Britomart area is built on a subterranean soup makes it mandatory.

In the past, seismic strengthening could disfigure a building with obtrusive cross-braces, virtually destroying a structure in order to save it. Advances in engineering have made it possible almost invisibly to strengthen buildings against subterranean earth movement. To get an idea of what can be done, take a look at the interior walls of the old CPO: what Richard Bollard describes as "some pretty serious concrete" has been poured to strengthen the walls, but the new, thick panels are bevelled back to meet the existing window frames, and artful use of neutral colours disguises the telltale contours.

Similar subtlety will be deployed in the restoration of the heritage precinct to the east of the new station. And, as Ian Grant explains, it is the building's exteriors that the council seeks to protect, because it's too late for the interiors.

"Apart from the CPO, only the Wharf Police Station, once the Colonial Sugar Refinery's Auckland office [built in 1904], has any interiors that have a lot of their original integrity.Most of the others have been done over numerous times.

"What's more, they were mostly warehouses,which means that they didn't have the fine detailing of the age. And because they have such large floor plates they are much easier to adapt internally."

The design brief calls for all the buildings to be "alive" at street level, with shops or cafés; any car parking or office space from which passing pedestrians are excluded has to be at first-floor level or above. The developers' main challenge, says Grant,will be restoring the street facades from top to bottom, but he denies that the concentration on exterior appearance raises the danger that the development will be an exercise in facadism. Egregious examples of it in Auckland are the Queen Street frontage of the BNZ Tower and the Queen's Head pub, on the corner of Queen Street and Mayoral Drive.

"The interiors of [the Britomart] places were not architectural splendours," says Grant. "They were working environments and the interiors reflected that. So there is nothing inappropriate about putting modern inserts into the skeleton structures."

Grant says the council's requirements in the redevelopment contract have also made a point of preserving all five elevations of any building - which includes the roof - so rooftop pools and exterior equipment will not be visible. Meanwhile, development behind or within the buildings will be low enough to be invisible from the street, so nothing will mar the view of the facades."When people walk down the street, they won't just see cardboard cutouts like the Queen's Head or like a street frontage in a Hollywood western.They will see a building that is three-dimensional."

The new "infill" buildings pose another design challenge. A carpark will rise next to the AH Nathan Building, where the remains of a mid-century service station can still be seen. David Reynolds explains that it is important to make the modern buildings fit in, but still be modern.

"It's highly desirable to have a building that speaks of its age rather than slavishly trying to copy one of the facades," he says.

To some extent, the success of the entire Britomart development depends on the commitment of local government to public transport. The existing transport centre set-up disproportionately favours train travellers, who get to use what is arguably the best station in the country even though they number fewer than 8000 a day, while the more numerous bus passengers cower in the cold and rain outside.

With the upcoming mayoral election being essentially a referendum on whether we commit ourselves to the eastern motorway project, that issue hangs in the balance. The city council's Ian Grant doubts that Britomart risks ending up as one of the city's prettiest wastelands, serving an orphan public transport system, because of the retail and residential development planned there. In any case, he says, it is a chance to create the city's first heritage precinct.

"Auckland city doesn't have any," he says."It has conservation areas, mainly around the northern part of the university. Certainly transport has been the key driver for all this, but it is also driven by heritage and urban renewal.

"We need to take advantage of the chance to look at this not as a whole lot of individual buildings but as a collection of buildings.As such, it is the first heritage precinct area that we have identified, and that's what's going to make it unique. All my arguments with developers are trying to tell them to make the most of what we've got. The uniqueness of this is doing it well, because there are no other buildings like this."

The Trust has long recognised the importance of the precinct with Customs Street and Quay Sreet both being registered as Historic Areas.