| Highlights
of Christchurch |
Cathedral Square has always been the heart of Christchurch.
According to English tradition, the presence of a cathedral meant that
Christchurch was officially a city well before the size of its population
justified this status. Strangely enough, my paternal grandmother,
who was German, had passed on this esoteric piece of information to me
at an early age and armed with this knowledge I won a prize during a three-week
long school geography tour of New Zealand which passed through Christchurch.
This is probably the first and last time that I have ever benefited from
the masses of largely worthless information which I willingly crammed into
my innocent mind.
Cathedral Square is a pleasant open area where tourists and locals can
mingle, with plenty of good shopping and restaurants within close walking
distance. People might do their supermarket shopping out in
the suburbs, but the center of Christchurch is still vibrant and a place
that people like to go, unlike the empty core of New Zealand's largest
city, Auckland. In Cathedral Square itself you can climb the
cathedral tower or sit outside to listen to local personality The Wizard,
who dresses the part, rants at great length and volume about feminism,
and might now have retired to not-so-quiet obscurity, leaving the city
a poorer place. |
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The citizens' War
Memorial Statue is right next to the cathedral - you can see it on the
left-hand side of the previous photo. It commemorates all of
the New Zealanders who died during world war one to make the world safe
from Kaiser Wilhelm.
This statue caused
controversy when it was proposed, because the Bridge of Remembrance had
already been suggested as a memorial, and the two projects had to compete
against each other for funding. Nevertheless, they both got
built and the statue with its more central location adds interest to the
square. |
From Cathedral Square
you can catch one of the old-time electric trams which were brought back
into service as a tourist attraction. They do a loop around
the inner city, dropping people off at various destinations where visitors
might want to go. |
| Christchurch
was a carefully planned and controlled settlement and, as even its name
suggests, a deliberate effort was made to create a little slice of England
here, down to the transporting of a vertical slice of English society,
with landed gentry at the top and servants at the bottom. There's
still an aspect of this class structure in the city and in some quarters
it still matters which high school you went to and what your ancestor's
station in life was. However, in my six years in Christchurch
I never experienced this snobbery personally and the strong egalitarianism
of New Zealand society soon overwhelmed this attempt to transplant a foreign
class stratification. In some ways, though, Christchurch is
"more English than the English", with the willows overgrowing the Avon
river and boats still being punted by servants in boater hats - purely
for the tourist trade, of course. |
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| The
Anglican cathedral isn't the only one in Christchurch; this is the catholic
cathedral a bit further out from the center of town. However,
"The" Cathedral is the Anglican one, and catholics were always a small
slice of New Zealand society, except in a few areas such as the west coast
of the South Island. |
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| Downstream
from where the photo of the punters was taken you'll find the Ferrier Fountain,
across the river from Victoria Square, a nice little park with a statue
of - Queen Victoria, who else? The Ferrier Fountain is similar
in design to the El Alamein fountain in the suburb of King's Cross near
downtown Sydney, Australia. |
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| A
bit further downstream is the old Edmonds Band Rotunda, now used as a restaurant.
Edmonds Baking Powder, with its slogan of "sure to rise", was a real New
Zealand icon and I guess pretty much every house in the country had a packet
sitting in a cupboard. |
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| Sumner
beach is near the spot where the Avon River and its smaller sister the
Heathcote join forces and create an estuary, before meeting the Pacific
ocean. Cave Rock with a small structure on top is directly
in front of you, with the Sumner hill behind, with a narrow and winding
road climbing steeply up over the hill to Taylor's Mistake beach. |
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| Here's
Cave Rock, Sumner beach and the estuary from the top of Sumner Hill.
In the background you can see downtown Christchurch, and far across the
Canterbury Plains you can just make out the Southern Alps.
The estuary is a very popular spot for the city's windsurfers, even if
this is the place where the city's treated effluent is discharged into
the ocean! |
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| Downtown
Christchurch from the top of the Port Hills, which meet the ocean at Sumner.
One less desirable aspect of Christchurch is the smog which you can see
in this photo. The Southern Alps in the background are about
50 kilometers from Christchurch, but sometimes they're much more clearly
visible than in this photo. Residents of the city have long
had an unfortunate belief in their god-given right to burn coal, with the
result that the city gets quite polluted, especially in winter.
The smell of smoke when I left the house in the morning is one of my earliest
recollections of Christchurch, after moving down from the clear air of
Auckland. Another memory is the thick and rather surreal ceiling
of smoke which gathers just above the level of the street lights, when
a so-called "thermal inversion" traps the warm smog below a layer of cold
air. |
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| These
dramatic cliffs are less than a kilometer around the hill from Sumner beach.
You can watch sea birds such as cormorants from the path at the top of
the cliffs, or do paid tandem para-sailing jumps straight off the edge
of the cliffs immediately before you, landing at Taylor's Mistake beach,
outside the left-hand frame of this photo. |
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| And
here is Taylor's Mistake beach. It was a favourite haunt of
mine virtually every weekend during the summer, where I soaked up the rays
which eventually gave me a melanoma. It's a very pleasant spot
and you can walk along a path visible above the water on the far side of
the bay, all the way around to Godley Head, which has gun emplacements
to keep Lyttelton Harbour safe from the Czar and Czarina of Russia.
Somehow I neglected to do this walk during my six years in Christchurch,
so I guess I'll have to go back some day and make amends! |
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