Christchurch was a surprise.
We had been in Christchurch twice before on this trip; once when we landed from the North Island and on our way from Invercargill to Nelson.
Our first time through we stayed in one of the middle sections of town so that we could get out early in the morning. Our drive through downtown skirted along the south edge of downtown and back through the middle: there didn’t seem to be much to Christchurch.
The second time through we stayed on the north side of town just off of the main highway and didn’t venture into the main part of the city. From what we saw with those two trips, we were not sure what we were going to do for our final day in the city.
Somewhere in our journey, I had picked up a brochure about a walking tour of Christchurch, but I didn’t really look at it until we were settled into our hotel in Christchurch.
The brochure described a walking tour of Christchurch and provides a website where you can sign-up for the tours. Looking at the website, it appeared the tour was booked for the day. The brochure also provides an email address where you can send notes, so I sent a message asking if there was room for two more people.
With only an hour left before the tour, and because we hadn’t received an email reply, we decided to go to the starting point of the tour, the Christchurch Arts Centre – about a 10-minute walk from the hotel, to see if they would take additional people.
The Christchurch Arts Centre
The meeting point was “under the clock tower” of the Arts Centre. The Arts Centre is a hub for arts, culture, education, creativity and entrepreneurship in New Zealand. It is a national landmark as it is home to New Zealand’s largest collection of category one heritage buildings. Built in the Gothic Revival style, with 21 of the 23 buildings covered by Heritage New Zealand listings.
The Arts Centre has a long history, with its beginnings in 1873 as Canterbury College, the second University to be established in New Zealand.
Registration for the walking tour is in a little hallway that leads to an exhibition, and as such wasn’t well marked as the signage for the exhibition was more prominent.
Once we were signed up for the walk, I took a closer look at the entrance to the exhibit. It is a tribute to Ernest Rutherford, the father of nuclear physics, who studied at Canterbury as an undergraduate student from 1890 – 1895. Apparently, Rutherford was born near Nelson and this was his local University.
In my chemistry program we studied a bit about nuclear chemistry, so it was cool to see Rutherford’s ideas on display, one of his classrooms and the den where he did some of his first physics experiments. There are even replicas of his 1908 Noble Prize, along with all of his other awards were also on display.
The Walk Christchurch Tour
The history of the Arts Centre was a springboard to the tour.
We toured through the grounds, into the Great Hall and though the campus. Unfortunately, parts of the campus were severely damaged in the September 2010 earthquake so we weren’t able to see into many buildings.
The Arts Centre has been able to stabilize the buildings, but, even more than a decade later, there is still a lot of restoration work to be done. In order to help fund the restoration the original observatory has been converted to a chic hotel.
One thing our guide emphasized was that the tour would be a tour of two cities: Christchurch before and after the two big earthquakes of September 4, 2010 and February 22, 2011.
The first earthquake occurred at 4:35 am about 40 km west of Christchurch about 10 km below ground. The second, more devastating quake, occurred at 12:51 pm only 5 km beneath the surface of a suburb of Christchurch. As a result, the second earthquake was far more devastating. Christchurch is built on sand. In an earthquake, sand undergoes liquefaction and buildings that are not properly supported end up moving as if they were in a basin of water, which exasperated the problems in Christchurch.
Our first stop was between the Christchurch Art Gallery and the City Council Offices, both new buildings. Our guide discussed the building highlighting the earthquake mitigation measures that have been put into place in the design of the buildings.
From there we viewed some of the destruction from the earthquakes: the gothic Canterbury Provincial buildings and the Anglican Church in the center of the city in Cathedral Square. Unfortunately, although these are both heritage buildings and built in the gothic style, there has not been enough money to restore either site and the buildings have only been stabilized to prevent further decay.
Christchurch also has some monuments to New Zealand accomplishments. Near the Convention Centre there are monuments to Kate Sheppard, who was instrumental in the New Zealand Women’s Suffrage movement, Queen Victoria (who’s statue was one vandalized and still shows traces or red paint), Captain Cook, and Robert Falcon Scott, who led two expeditions to the Antarctic.
We trapsed through the commercial district looking at a gothic church that had been converted to a brew pub, the Riverside Market, a beehive of small shops and eateries before stopping at the Bridge of Remembrances, one of New Zealand’s tributes to fallen soldiers.
Our final stop, after 3 hours of walking, was the Canterbury Earthquake National Memorial, which is a remembrance of the dead from the earthquakes and space to reflect on the calamity of the quakes.
The tour took up a large part of the day and we finished up by going through the Christchurch Art Gallery before having dinner in a small Thai restaurant in the New Regent Street Precinct, a series of 1930’s Spanish art deco style buildings around the corner form the hotel.