Threat to the stone city

In Canberra at the start of this month, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Environment Minister Peter Garrett were able to tell their proud fellow Australians that physical expressions of their country's founding story were now enshrined and valued at an international level. Or, to put it more simply, 11 convict sites in Sydney, Port Arthur, Fremantle and Norfolk Island had been given Unesco World Heritage status.

In Christchurch three days later, Australian heritage planner Benjamin Gall and his brother, architect Anthony Gall, showed an audience of nearly 100 people slides of some of these sites. One is a creaky wooden barn in Tasmania. If it doesn't look like much to the untrained eye, it has a 200-year history and was built with convict labour. It has value.

This was all a preamble to the more pressing issue at hand: the possibility of world heritage status for the gothic revival buildings of Christchurch.

Just as 11 sites separated by thousands of kilometres and stretches of ocean can be considered as one heritage listing, so can a scattering of stone buildings around central Christchurch, from the Arts Centre and Canterbury Museum on Rolleston Ave to the Holy Trinity Anglican Church in Avonside.

The Gall brothers tell their audience that world heritage recognition for central Christchurch is "pivotal". Few in the room would disagree.

For some, this pair might even have the status of heroes. They brought their heritage expertise to two recent Christchurch planning stoushes: the war over the extension to the Canterbury Museum and the no-less- traumatic fight over the University of Canterbury's music conservatorium proposal at the Arts Centre. In both cases, heritage activists won. Other, local, veterans of those stoushes, such as professor Ian Lochhead and Dame Ann Hercus, are in the audience.

And how apt that the venue for their talk is the marvellous Stone Chamber at the Canterbury Provincial Council Buildings on Durham Street, arguably the jewel in the crown of gothic Christchurch.

The Gall brothers are at pains to point out that buildings such as these do not just add texture or variety to a modern city, but also express a philosophy. The planned city was an instrument of 19th- century social reform; world heritage status would recognise not just the buildings but the near-utopian ideas behind them.

Ideally, they say, it would recognise an entire precinct. Draw a map that takes in the Botanic Gardens and Cranmer Square to the east, Worcester Boulevard through the centre and Cathedral Square and Latimer Square to the west, and call that the original frame of gothic Christchurch. Recognise that the original street layout remains, that the scale mostly remains.

Passing the microphone back and forth, the Galls talk for nearly two hours, sketching in the history and anticipating the future. They talk about how 19th-century thinkers like John Ruskin and William Morris influenced the neo-medieval city, the concept of the garden city. How their ideas spread around the globe, to places as diverse as Hungary - where Anthony Gall lives and works - and California, as well as the South Island of New Zealand. How ideas of a liveable city, as a response to industrialisation and the stresses of modernity, are as relevant now as they were then. If not more relevant.

The next morning, in a Press meeting room, the Galls talk for another 90 minutes about central Christchurch and its heritage.

One of the "unique and peculiar" things about this city, they agree, is the way that the gothic revival style lasted so long, right up to the Centennial Wing of the Canterbury Museum, taking in late entrants that now look to be seamlessly in the early style, such as Christchurch Boys' High School and the Teachers College building on Peterborough St. Then, in the modernist era, houses by Peter Beaven referred back to the medieval.

Think of that continued progression. And think of the way that some have lost sight of the original idea - as he says this, Benjamin Gall has his eye firmly on the increasingly shabby-looking 1960s Government Life building across Cathedral Square. Were that to be knocked down, his brother says, it would be easy to design something new that sits with neo-gothic principles, "rather than reiterating these cliches from other cities in the world".

The previous night, Benjamin Gall had been publicly critical of the $300,000 report commissioned by the Christchurch City Council from Danish urban design specialist Jan Gehl. While the report touched on heritage issues, it showed no understanding of the 19th-century philosophies that shaped the city, Gall argues.

"If you're bringing in someone who hasn't stopped to understand those grand philosophies that have continued over a long period of time, and focused on rolling out what could be argued is a more generic or desktop-style report that isn't Christchurch-centric, then you're proposed a generic way forward.

"Certainly, in the periods we're talking about with Christchurch, the evidence of a town that was planned out and settled in a short period of time, that's still active and relevant, is rare and unique on a world scale."

And while the city is colonial, in important ways it is less new than we think. The mid to late 19th-century was the great period of city building in Europe and North America and cities like Barcelona, Budapest and Paris were transformed in that era, with their redevelopment sometimes contemporary with Christchurch's development. The creation of Hagley Park was almost exactly contemporary with the first public park in the United States: Central Park, New York.

But what would world heritage status do for Christchurch? Beyond the obvious tourist benefits, there is also the issue of certainty. In the Arts Centre case, it seems astonishing that Christchurch had never publicly discussed whether more buildings should go up on that block. Indeed, while the conservatorium project has been defeated, there is still no guideline.

During their two-day visit, before one brother went back to Budapest and the other to Brisbane, the Galls met with city council heritage staff and Arts Centre director Ken Franklin. In the council case, they found that staff were still focused on the site level - this building, that building - rather than considering whole environments as "cultural landscapes", which is the new thinking. As for Franklin, it is Benjamin Gall's view that "he's trying very hard, but at a strategic level, the advice still isn't coming to him".

As has been previously reported, there was a 1991 management plan for the Arts Centre that had some heritage dimension. Since then, there has piecemeal documentation of each separate building, but no overarching heritage strategy. Both brothers say a site that valuable needs one.

Such a strategy would interlock with a revamped city plan that considers the wider area. One of Anthony Gall's concerns is the threat to the traditional buffer zone between Montreal St and the river. Both the police building and the former mail centre are too big for that zone, he says, and while little can be done about that now, the refurbishment of the mail centre as the new council headquarters creates "a serious issue".

"It's taken an awful lot of people from the city centre and moved them to an area which you can see is not traditionally the city centre. If other people want to be down there because they want to be near the council, you might find that the whole city leapfrogs the river. The old centre of the city is becoming derelict, redundant."

His observation, as he studied Google Maps in his office in Budapest, was that the conservatorium would have created a visual link between the heritage area and the expanding city - that was a risk. But risks still remain, not just questions about what else might go on the Arts Centre site, but what will be built on the vast car park that used to be the King Edward Barracks site bordering Cashel and Montreal streets. This is the land earmarked for Ngai Tahu's new headquarters.

"Very easily you could find that you have another building the size of the council building. Or they might take some of these issues on and be pro- active. They could turn the city around - they have a real opportunity on their hands."

While the Galls are unconvinced that the Arts Centre board is getting sufficiently informed heritage advice, the recent resource consent hearings showed that such experience and expertise does exist in Christchurch - with Ian Lochhead being the most obvious example.

"There was an incredibly high level of debate," Anthony Gall says.

"The next step is a strategic one and it requires some guts and courage," Benjamin Gall continues. "Some people are worried about what notions of world heritage might pre-empt on a city. We're worried about what will happen to the city if these notions aren't clarified."

- © Fairfax NZ News