Christchurch was made for flâneurs and flâneueses. It was planned in the mid-19th century, when bi-pedalism was the main mode of human locomotion (unless you could afford to saddle your own quadruped). It’s flat, it’s organised on a grid, and if a stroll starts to turn into a slog, the urban wanderer can rest by the river, or in the 165 green hectares of Hagley Park.
This all sounds very urbane, but as anyone who has walked through contemporary Christchurch knows, it’s surprising how quickly a predictable promenade can become a disorienting experience. On many of the central city blocks, there’s no ‘there’ there any more. A decade after its disastrous earthquakes, Christchurch is still in a state of becoming. It will be at least a couple of generations before the gaps in the central cityscape are filled.
When I set out, with photographer Patrick Reynolds, to produce a walking guide to Christchurch architecture, I thought there might be quite a lot of walking for not much architecture. The good news, however, is that many significant Christchurch buildings have survived, usually in a restored state, and some excellent new buildings have joined them. By walking the guide’s six routes an urban tourist can join the dots of the city’s architectural history.
And that history is remarkably coherent. From the start, Christchurch was a city that cared about architecture. It helped that it was an intentional city, not an accidental one, and that it got off to such a strong start, architecturally, thanks to Benjamin Mountfort, a prolific exponent of Christchurch’s foundational gothic revival style. The baton got passed down through the decades: Mountfort employed Samuel Hurst Seager who employed Cecil Wood who employed Sir Miles Warren and Paul Pascoe. This lineage connects the stongest periods in Christchurch architecture: the city’s gothic revival heyday, from the 1860s to the 1880s, and the modernist period, from the 1950s to the 1970s, dominated by Warren and Mahoney.
Work from these eras and these architects, and other styles (classical, art deco, Spanish mission, neo-Georgian, contemporary tilt slab, steel and glass) and other architects (Collins and Harman, Hall and Mackenzie, Peter Beaven, Andrew Patterson, Sheppard & Rout, Wilkie + Bruce, Architectus and Jasmax) punctuates the guide’s walking routes. It’s invidious to play favourites, but I do especially like a couple of small modernist buildings: 65 Cambridge Terrace (Warren and Mahoney, 1962), and Toi Moroki Centre of Contemporary Art (Minson, Henning-Hansen and Dines, 1968); and a couple of great Christchurch rooms: the Memorial Dining Room at Christ’s College (Cecil Wood, 1925), and Christchurch Town Hall (Warren and Mahoney, 1972, restored 2019).
Others will have their own favourite buildings – even after what it has been through, Christchurch manages to pack 160 years of architectural history into the area bounded by the four avenues (with a special side order of modernism at Canterbury University’s Ilam campus). And the city is adding to its architectural stock all the time. In a few years, our guide will need a second edition.
Christchurch Architecture: A Walking Guide
Massey University Press, $19.99
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