Two, painted a russet hue, bookend a converted car wash now occupied by Cargo Bar, in the emerging business hub of Addington. Owner Henare “H” Akuhata-Brown opened the venue last August, just months after his popular city-center Lyme Bar was shuttered following the February earthquake. “The first question my partner Angelique and I asked ourselves was whether we even wanted to stay in Christchurch,” says H, who is originally from Hawke’s Bay. “We did —it’s a very special place, and we want to be part of the rebuilding process.”
That process is expected to take at least 15 years, but when it’s complete, city planners hope to have reinvented Canterbury’s regional capital as a smart, sustainable 21st-century city. In the meantime, more than two dozen businesses have returned to the Cashel Street retail precinct, right on the edge of the red zone, where gutted buildings have been replaced by a pedestrian shopping mall made from stacked shipping containers. Called Re:START, the makeshift complex has brought a measure of buzz back to the downtown area, too, with clothing outlets and cafés doing a brisk trade. I picked up a fleece for my next day’s drive into the Canterbury high country, thumbed through photo books about the city’s quake-ruined architecture (one particularly poignant volume was titled All Fall Down: Christchurch’s Lost Chimneys), and, take-out latte—they call them flat whites here—in hand, stood among a knot of other tourists watching as a monster-jawed excavator chewed through a 10-story building on the other side of the cordon. At one point, a huge slab of concrete and twisted rebar toppled 30 meters to the ground. I felt a tremor through the pavement.
“What are you looking at?” chided a passing teenager, clearly put off by our rubbernecking. “They’ve torn down hundreds of buildings already. What’s the big deal?”
Duly chastised, I followed the now-silent tramline toward the Christchurch Botanic Gardens. First planted in 1863, at about the same time that the prolific Victorian architect George Gilbert Scott was polishing off his design for Christchurch Cathedral, the gardens today are more of a refuge than ever. Amid the stands of century-old “exotic” (which is to say, imported) trees like beech and yew and oak, and native plantings of fern and eucalyptus, there’s little to remind you of the city’s troubles. Nor could there be a more idyllic scene than boatmen from the old Antigua Boat Sheds poling Cambridge-style punts down the willow-draped Avon River on its looping course through the park.
With its punts and its tearooms and its peppering of Gothic Revival architecture, Christchurch has traditionally regarded itself as the most English of New Zealand cities. I headed to the Canterbury Museum to learn something about its history. Instead, I found myself back in the present, or at least the very recent past. The Canterbury Quakes exhibition presented an overview of the area’s seismic scars, beginning with the nonfatal but powerful earthquake of September 2010, which was for many Cantabrians the first they learned that they were living on a fault line. But most of the displays had to do with the February quake of the following year. Among the most poignant artifacts was the cross from the fallen spire of Christchurch Cathedral—three meters of crumpled copper sheathing and splintered wood.
