Port town potential

Lyttelton grows up and out

Jason Larraman

The old port is becoming a hot spot.

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Once home to the seedier side of the shipping industry, Lyttelton is gradually swapping shabby for chic.

Captain John Cleaver is a happy man. He's just been given a clean bill of health by his doctor and he's got it in writing. "The letter says my brain is normal," John says. That's a relief for both of us. For him, because at 81 it's nice to know you're still shipshape, and  for me, because it's his brain I've come to pick.

There is not much John doesn't know about Lyttelton. The former seafarer has lived in the town since 1956.

"At that time, there could be about 600 people just coming off the ships on any one night," he says. "We had two butchers, a tailor, a barbershop, a hospital and four taxis that ferried people from the trains to their doorsteps. It was always busy."

With the opening of the road tunnel through the Port Hills in 1964, things began to change. As people travelled into Christchurch, businesses slowly started to close and the town's lustre began to dull.

By the 1980s, Lyttelton had become gritty and rough around the edges. Nobody readily admitted to living there.

"Lyttelton really lost its way for a while," says Wendy Everingham, who heads Project Lyttelton, a group started in 1994, initially to look at historical issues and later environmental ones. "It wasn't somewhere you really boasted about living. There was a perception that it was a port town full of drunken, smelly sailors and prostitutes."

It was into this atmosphere that English-born author and social commentator Joe Bennett emerged, blinking, from the Lyttelton tunnel.

"I had bought this terrifyingly big car off a dealer on Ferry Road and I was too scared to turn it around," he says. "I just kept on going and eventually came out through the tunnel into Lyttelton."

He says it's the feeling you're going on an adventure that attracts people to Lyttelton. "Ports are rakish and cosmopolitan. Someone got stabbed to death the week I arrived."

*Read more in September's issue*