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

The Big Picture

ESSAY, by Hamish Keith

Auckland on the surface is a city without a past. Hamish Keith tries to understand why it appears to repudiate its heritage.

His Majesty's Theatre and arcade building, Queen Street, 1977. Image: Special Collections, Auckland City Libraries IS No 435-B5-239A

Early in the last century, a writer in the Cyclopedia of New Zealand had a pretty fair idea how Auckland was going to turn out.A city site as beautiful as the Garden of Eden, he thought, had fallen into the hands of hooligans.Those were not his exact words, but they were the drift of what he wrote. And he was right. Given a choice between urban beauty and junk, those who have planned Auckland have gone for junk every time. The few elegant moments that popped up in the past have been most mmediately valued for landfill. It must be something in the water.

Auckland's first town plan, the work of Felton Mathews, was an elegant affair.A bunch of Georgian crescents rolling down the hill from old Government House, with the business and commercial precinct rising up Shortland Street to meet them.One fire later, and Auckland's visionary businessmen stampeded to relocate along the muddy Ligar canal dribbling down Queen Street and have stayed there since.There could not, one might have thought, been much future in a city built on an open sewer.

The site of His Majesty's Theatre and arcade building, Queen Street, as it is today. Image: Alex Scott

Most thoughtful citizens are aware of the constant chipping away by the city at its built heritage.A shrug of a mayoral shoulder and another Edwardian crescent theatre or a Victorian shop row is reduced to a pile of rubble.Those are the obvious victims of what seems to be a civic fear of the past.

More insidious and less noticed is the constant nibbling away at the heritage fabric of the place. Some wretched council committee, egged on by a half-baked planner, declares a theme for a makeover and another bunch of the central city's urban wrinkles are smoothed out. Elliot Street was a fine example of an intact Victorian street made over into a contemporary slum, as is the hideous little grotto made out of Khartoum Place. The area around Britomart is another scheduled for this mindless blight of theming. Even more of a worry is the grand plan for Queen Street. The problem here is context. No planner or designer seems to have sat down and thought through how the existing heritage elements of an area should govern its re-development.

A suburban version of this is the so-called "picket-fence" zones - streets where by some magic declaration a picket fence is the very measure of heritage conservation. Franklin Road in Ponsonby is one of these. A careful wander along it will certainly reveal a picket fence or two - most of them as a result of planning fiat - but a whole lot of other fencing styles are there as well, and some of them are far better suited to the buildings that sport them and to the nature of this busy arterial street. Even more to the point is that many of the other fence styles are of the street's heritage inventory. I make this point to underline what clearly is a misunderstanding about how the past and the present might interact. It certainly is not through this kind of prescriptive micro-management.

If Auckland suffers from some anti-heritage malaise, it is probably more to do with a complete inability to see the city as a whole than any deeper angst. Even among its planners, there seems to be no clear view as to the totality of the city. If there were, the essential contribution made to that by the heritage elements might be better understood. Heritage buildings are not to be valued simply because they are old and quaint, but because they are an essential part of a city's identity. They are the marks on its face that give it character and impress with the security of age and experience.

Heritage gives life in a city meaning. The existence of heritage buildings as a continuing element in the urban fabric is the difference between a built city with memory or a huddle of knocked together frontier shanties with none. It might seem an odd call, but the presence of a past has a salutary effect on the present simply by being there. Somewhere in one of her novels, Robin Hyde described two old villas behind Karangahape Road standing amidst the crumbling slum houses like "two old dames caught up in a hot party".

There are simply too few dames caught up in the cheapskate orgy that passes for development in Auckland's CBD. Some strong heritage elements survive still in the central city, but they have not been given a determining role to play. There ought to be some considered definition of these elements as a whole.

For example, the blocks between Victoria Street and Shortland Street on the eastern side of Queen Street are more valuable as a heritage whole than they are building by building - there are of course a few outstanding buildings among them. There must be ways to exploit those heritage elements and ensure that they have an impact at street level as well as above the verandahs.

Adding to Auckland's heritage crisis is that any experience of the little urban heritage we have is almost completely obliterated at street level. One of the key impacts a heritage building can make is when it dominates a corner site. Look at the top of Queen Street, or the corner of Symonds Street and Khyber Pass, to see how little Auckland's urban planners and architects understood a message as simple as that.

To make retained built heritage an active element in current urban design is the real challenge. Continuums, not fractures, are the planning elements needed. This is not achieved by forcing heritage imitations on designers - as in the picket-fence zones - but by encouraging innovative relationships between the past and the present. The past is a standard, not an unyielding model. If we had a planning mindset that saw the city fabric as a whole, we might be less tolerant of granting consents to buildings we already know will let it down.