And all of it is contained, neatly and precisely, within the borders of a map.
THE CENTRAL CITY, WITH ITS multi-million dollar precincts and its contentious cathedral and the ongoing battle between local and national government, has taken centre stage. It has been the loudest, the most demanding, the most dramatic, with the best pictures and the punchiest sound bites. Elsewhere in the country, when people talk about ‘the rebuilding of Christchurch’, they are usually referring to this, the commercial and retail centre.
But the centre is just one part of a much larger mosaic. Beyond the grid, there are other narratives of rebuilding, and those stories are every bit as powerful, to the individuals involved, as an argument over a stadium or a cathedral.
You have to look closely at the map to see them. In the upper right-hand corner, for example, within the Four Avenues, there is a cluster of streets bordered by the river. It’s the part of the city with which I became familiar when I first arrived in 1992. It’s where I bought my first house in 1993, where I burned down the dunny and was visited by a man who knew to bring a gift of dry firewood. It’s a tiny neighbourhood, one among hundreds in the city, but it’s one I know.
Here’s what happened there following the quake, quietly, and largely unattended, on the edges of the whizz bang and argument at the centre.
This is the story of the Avon Loop.
IT BEGINS AS EVERY STORY of this city begins, with the river. Its waters rise in springs to the west through conical puna among tutu and fern and flow in a tangled yarn eastward to the sea. Midway along its length it jinks slightly to the north, curves for a kilometre or so, then recovers its original intention. At this point within the curve, the waters become tidal and when people arrive it is here that they haul up their waka, and step ashore. The river is shallow enough to cross on foot, so tracks converge on its banks leading on higher ground to the coast and to the path zigzagging over the hills to the settlements around the harbour.
This is where Tautahi comes to gather kai, where Maka-iti-iti rushes to join the main current. It is where one of the men who named the city’s streets occupies the canvas-covered whare of Sydney Scroggs.
The street that rules off the base of the loop in the river from east to west is named Kilmore, for an Irish episcopacy. Within the area confined by that line and the loop in the river, land is set aside for a botanic garden. Below the garden, on the southern side of Kilmore Street, is a cattle market, and across the river to the north, the city’s cemetery. Working out from this point on the river, streets are named and the blocks defined that have been bought at bargain rates and meticulously prepared for sale.
In the event, the soils within the loop of the river prove too patchy for a botanical collection and it is relocated across the city to Hagley Park. In its place a commercial plant nursery is established, part of the 18 acre empire of William ‘Cabbage’ Wilson, where settlers might purchase such horticultural delights as the pines Wilson hopes will someday ‘clothe with luxuriant green the slopes and summits of our dry and ever-shifting sandhills’. And gorse, so very suitable for hedging those same slopes. But within a decade, that, too, has gone and the loop in the river is left more or less to pasture. In an early photograph, a horse grazes the banks. In the background, where Kilmore Street bridges the river, is the blurred brick bulk of Wards Brewery, with its five-storey tower, twin kilns and commodious offices. Other bridges lead north to the cemetery on Barbadoes Street, and west across Madras towards the centre and the Square.
Some things are built, some remain on the map. A canal is proposed to link this reach of the river with the coast and the port in Lyttelton, but a railway line seems a better idea. A tunnel is built beneath the hills, and the canal fades to a tree-lined avenue cutting a diagonal through Linwood.
The waters of the Avon are given over to recreation. Within the loop capacious structures house the city’s rowing clubs: the Union, founded in 1864 by workers on the Christchurch to Lyttelton railway, the Avon Club and, in splendid turreted mock Tudor, the Canterbury. Each year in the first week of October the season opens, with ‘gay flags … strung across the sparkling river bank and above them all from the flagstaff atop Wards Brewery … the national flag, the old Union Jack’. The Garrison Band plays as the boats process in single file downriver from Barbadoes bridge, decorated with lilac and green leaves: whiffs, pairs and fours, Ulysses, Minerva, Electric, Lurline. Three cheers for the Queen! Oars peaked. Three cheers for the new season!
ON THE ROUGH GROUND NEIGHBOURING the rowing clubrooms there is a scattering of houses until the 1880s, when development begins in earnest. Tracks become streets that are channelled, shingled, named. Willow Street is named in 1885 for the weeping willows that have displaced flax and toetoe on this antipodean Avon. Rees Street is named in 1893 for a boatbuilder who lives here. In 1892 there is a Queen Street, but there are two other Queen Streets within this very loyal city, so to avoid confusion, the name is changed to Union Street, after the rowing club, and in 1948, to Bangor Street, making a late entry to the catalogue of bishoprics. At the same time, Avon Street is renamed Hurley Street, while York Street becomes Nova Place, which is ‘Avon’ spelled backwards. Following the banks of the river are twin terraces: Cambridge on the northern bank and Oxford on the southern, both ending at Fitzgerald Avenue.
Elsewhere in this flat city, streets stretch for miles, dead straight, but here, the curve of the river cuts them short. The central stem, Bangor, runs a couple of short blocks between Kilmore and Oxford Terrace on the riverbank. Hurley, Rees, Willow and Nova are tiny branchlets, lined with houses that are not for the wealthy of the city, who prefer to live further west, or on the hillsides above the city smog. They certainly do not want to live in such propinquity to the brewery, breathing hops and malt, or the civic rubbish destructor, smokily putting paid to the city’s detritus only a few blocks away.
The houses built within the loop are intended for working people. Along Queen (Union/Bangor) Street, according to Wise’s Street Directory of 1903, live a fitter, an iron turner, three grooms, a gardener, a pickle manufacturer, a carpenter, a hairdresser and two coopers and a maltster, who were no doubt employed by the brewery across the road. Their homes are cottages of two or three bedrooms, of weatherboard, roofed with corrugated iron, though some try for greater grandeur with a verandah and double sash windows. They stand face-on to the street, fronted by small gardens with room for a few flowers, while around the back there are vegetables and blackcurrants, a plum tree, maybe, or a walnut. Many have their own well, drawing water from the springs and channels that lie not far below the surface. Until the mid-twentieth century, the nightman comes round with his cart to collect the sewage.
This is pretty much how the neighbourhood remains through two world wars and catastrophic depression, through flood and snowstorm and tearing nor’west gale. The houses are home to children who play on the riverbanks and men and women who dig the gardens, bike to work, pop next door for a cup of sugar, join the six o’clock swill at the Star and Garter, the pub on the riverbank by the Barbadoes Street bridge. It’s that sort of area. By 1940, the directory hints that it has, if anything, become a little shabbier. The homeowners on Bangor Street now include a fitter, a dentist, an asphalter and a butcher, but over half the men list their occupation simply as ‘labourer’.
In 1955, the brewery closes. In 1959 the last of the rowing clubs shifts downriver to purpose-built waters at Kerrs Reach, but other clubs take their place. Some of the old cottages are demolished to make way for rugby clubrooms, a smallbore rifle club, the Commercial Club and the city’s bridge club. Just across the river there’s a swimming pool for recreation, originally planned to commemorate the nation’s centennial in 1940 and finally opened after the war in 1950.
A small factory manufactures concrete washtubs at the end of Nova Place, and there is a plumbing warehouse on Bangor Street. But by and large, the area is residential: a little down at heel, unnoticed by the wider city.
IN THE 1960S, HOWEVER, THERE is a change. It is the same change that is taking place in inner-city neighbourhoods around the world. In Gastown in Vancouver, Cabbage Town in Toronto, Camden Town in London, what used to be disregarded as cramped and grim suddenly acquires a new gloss.
As older working-class residents die, their homes are bought up by people born after the war. Blessed by the state with good health, free education and ample opportunity for employment or self-expression, they are convinced of their capacity to create utopia. They will counter the anonymity of spreading suburbia by creating islands of beauty and neighbourliness at the centre between high-rises and motorways. Former tenements become funky flats, their walls crimson with purple trim, and flowers painted on the letterbox. Kitchens that have been the despair of generations of bony women take on Mexican wall hangings and second-hand Windsor chairs stripped to the essence of unadorned timber.
I am of the stripping generation. We spent hours scraping, renovating, restoring, in search of something: the past, perhaps, though not the actual past of typhus, TB, limited education and low-paid toil. We sought a more kindly idyll of authenticity and small-scale neighbourliness within the urban sprawl. We wanted to stage our lives in rooms opened to the sunlight by the removal of walls and the installation of recycled French doors and patios of old bricks. In such neighbourhoods, the derelict factories that had once manufactured the marvels of Victorian and Edwardian engineering were turned to art and theatre and music. Rundown pawn shops became wholefood co-operatives. Wasteland became communal gardens of spray-free broccoli and those inner-city cottages took on something called ‘character’, as if they were living beings with a personality and an authentic story.
In Christchurch, this process takes place within this stretch of the river. For the first time it acquires an identifiable status. It is ‘the Avon Loop’ or more simply, ‘the Loop’.
Why does it happen here?
It’s partly economic. The houses are affordable. But it is also because someone sees them as beautiful. One of Grayson Perry’s artists, perhaps, someone responsive to the way sunlight falls across a verandah. The Loop receives the full blessing of the sun from the north, with no tall commercial blocks to cast a shadow. It has the beauty of the river. The river has always been useful, for kai or for docking goods or for rowing, but now it begins to be valued for the sway of willow branches and the airy quality that water always lends its surroundings. The river also offers, in this city of straight lines and right angles, a break in the dominant pattern. It offers an open vista, a public vista unowned by any individual, rather than the immediate view of a neighbour’s fence. It offers curves and irregularity to those who value such qualities.
The Loop and the interlocking streets within it have the additional effect of creating a sociable place. There is no through traffic. These roads don’t go on forever to somewhere important, but end after no more than 100 metres or so, at the riverbank. The little houses with their small gardens, built before the invention of the motor car, have no garages to block the interaction between home and street. If you want to speak to your neighbours, you need do nothing more than sit on the verandah and sooner or later someone will walk by, pause for a chat.
In official terms, this is a ‘decaying area’, its stock of houses in poor condition. A 1980 city council report describes only fifteen houses as good, forty-five as average and thirty-five as poor or fair. Forty-one houses date from before 1900, and twenty-eight from between 1900 and 1919. But now these houses have ‘character’ and this is a ‘heritage area’. They have taken on a value significant to a number of people.
THE AESTHETICS OF PLACE are personal. Some of us favour order, precision, straight lines and tidy measurement, some prefer the random curve, and the two modes of being are as mutually incomprehensible as if their proponents came from opposite ends of the Earth and spoke different languages. But as Shulamith Firestone or Robin Morgan, or whoever it was among the feminist theorists of the 70s, pointed out, the personal is political.
Politically the Avon Loop was leftward leaning, as such areas of a city tend to be — like the Aro Valley in Wellington, or as Auckland’s Ponsonby used to be — areas that were routinely described in newspapers for over a century as ‘hotbeds of radical socialism’. It is not universal, of course, but by and large the residents of the Avon Loop also favoured parties of the left, from the mildest forms of socialism or environmentalism to communism. When the Values Party was formed in the 70s, it found a strong following in the Loop, as did its descendant, the Green Party, whose first co-leader, Rod Donald, lived here for several years.
Back in 1944, two of the Loop’s most notable residents had moved into a house at 362 Oxford Terrace. Jack Locke was a freezing worker, Elsie Locke a feminist and writer, and both were passionate communists, at least until 1956, when the painful realisations consequent on the Hungarian Revolution caused Elsie to leave the party. Jack remained a member till his death, standing regularly as a communist candidate in national elections. Their son Keith tells me how Elsie bought the house on Oxford Terrace with a small legacy from a brother killed during the war. The house was old, built in the 1880s, with just two bedrooms and in poor shape, but she had stood on the step and looked across to the river and decided, ‘This is the place I want to be.’ Soon after they moved in, Elsie and Jack took down the front fence. ‘They didn’t believe in fences. They wanted interaction. Our front step was only two or three metres from the street.’
Keith recalls an intimate post-war childhood, playing on the riverbank, swinging from the willows, running messages at threepence a time for neighbours to the butcher, the grocer, the fruiterer, who had shops around the corner on Kilmore Street. A modest family existence without telephones, a fridge, a washing machine or a car. School was within walking or cycling distance, as was the Centennial Pool, where Elsie swam daily until the end of her life.
He also recalls tuberculosis: his mother spent two years in a sanatorium when he was a toddler and he himself suffered from chronic bronchitis in a house uninsulated and heated by a coal fire. And he recalls how it was to be associated with the politics of the left back in that era of the Communist threat and the domino theory, even when you were a child.
He has in his possession a copy of his own security file, begun when he was eleven years old ‘because I was clearly a dangerous person’. The first entry records his attendance at a meeting of the William Morris Group, ‘a progressive cultural group my mother had set up with singing and dancing and so on’, named for the man who had not only designed those familiar textile patterns of daisies and pomegranates, but was also a dedicated and highly articulate communist and social commentator.
Keith’s name appears on a list of fifty attendees at a meeting on 12 December 1955, along with helpful notes by the distinctly creepy agent, ‘George’, working undercover for the New Zealand Police Force Special Branch, predecessor of the New Zealand Security Service, which was founded less than a year later by the National government to keep an eye on such subversives. (The names are, of course, given in full on the original.)
Mrs A— of Bangor Street is friendly with Elsie
LOCKE and is about 48 years of age, about
5’ 5” in height, stout build, long dark hair,
dark eyes. She has been twice married, has one
son … by the second marriage.
Mrs B— is about 49 years of age, about 5’ 2”
in height, brown hair greying, sharp features
and wears spectacles.
The evening’s activities are equally detailed. ‘Elsie LOCKE presented Mrs C— with a crystal vase. Mrs D— was overheard inviting Doris E— to a party at the D—s’ home during Christmas.’ Some of the attendees are also, notes George, members of that other highly subversive organisation, the Housewives’ Union, including, perhaps, Mrs B— in her spectacles and Mrs A— of Bangor Street.
Keith Locke’s file records other suspect activities, such as a cycling trip with h
is mother in 1956, and later, a showing of a Russian movie, a comedy, on a wet night to twenty members of a film society.
Surveillance and ill health are also part of the story of the Avon Loop, as is prolonged contention that tangles place with politics.
IN 1965 A HOTEL ARRIVED in the Loop. The Avon Motor Lodge appeared like a big white egg on the riverbank among the willows and settled to expansion. Its owners were a Christchurch family, the Carters, who began steadily buying up the old cottages as they came on the market. Within a few years they owned a third of the neighbourhood’s housing stock, which they demolished or rented until, in 1972, they announced a plan to increase the hotel’s existing eighty-eight units to 138, with the building of a six-storey extension. The city was about to host the 1974 Commonwealth Games and the hotel intended to be ready to meet the need for accommodation.
The Lockes swung into action. They prepared and circulated a petition which 90 per cent of their neighbours signed. They organised a meeting in one of the old rowing club sheds, where a residents’ association was established, the Avon Loop Protection Association or ALPA, and they prepared an appeal to the Town and Country Planning Board: the hotel extension would dominate the area, bringing shade, increased traffic, litter, food smells, flies. They presented their appeal. The magistrate turned it down. The Lockes, he said, did not live close enough to the hotel to be seriously affected. But the Lockes appealed that decision to the Supreme Court in Wellington, and their appeal was upheld. The hotel abandoned its plans for extension.
‘CELEBRATIONS!!!’ wrote Elsie Locke in the minutes for the next meeting of ALPA. ‘Carter withdrawn, circular to residents, inform of success!’
The Villa at the Edge of the Empire Page 13
