This pile of rubble is the Clarendon building. About 10 months ago I photographed the start of its deconstruction. The Cathedral roof can be seen in the centre distance.
This piece of land is all that remains of The Strip, the main bar/restaurant area in the central city. We now have no problem with car parking in the city. Pity there's no reason to go there any more.
Caffe Roma - still standing. Hope this can be saved. New cafes have popped up all over, but few have the ambience that this one had.
An artist painted a 'reflection' of the building behind the fence. This is the Government Life building, a sixties bureaucratic horror that will be demolished, although some people want to retain it as a good example of its type. (Modernist? International Style? School of Milton Keynes?)
Ghost building - wall of Caffee Roma
This pile of rubble was Farmers department store and car park, which took up most of the block. The wall at extreme left is the Christchurch City Library, which is also to be demolished. Many of my colleagues had their cars trapped in the car park after the February quake, it was very unsafe. The parking building canted over to lean against the back wall of the library.
And this is where we park the Mayor's spaceship! I have no idea what this is.
This is New Regent Street, which is soon to reopen to the public. It's a Spanish Mission style street of small shops, with a little Hollywood thrown in. There would be few people in Christchurch who don't like this, it's very unique, and a wonderful job has been done on the rebuild/renovations.
Isaac Theatre Royal, a beautiful old theatre that had just reopened after years of renovations. The quake of February put paid to these - deeply disheartening.
Just a few pictures from the Festival of Flowers in the Botanic Gardens, to cheer you up.
One of the booths - this is a mockup of a sixties beach bach
A trip down Nostalgia Street - this had all of us of a certain age saying "Remember those..."
And a dahlia from the dahlia border.
So a mix of the disheartening, the old, the new. the fascinating, the nostalgic and the beautiful. Pretty good walk, really.
Watched a documentary about the February quake in Christchurch on Friday night and cried through much of it. have rarely seen anything quite so frightening. Great to see the rebuilding, L.
ReplyDeleteYes, it was very scary, one of those times when a person really thinks "I'm not going to get out of this alive", a real sense of one's own fragility and mortality.
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