This series will profile the people who make Christchurch tick, give a voice to the region’s diverse communities and debate how the city can best accommodate its growing number of residents while examining the issues facing the city. Video / NZ Herald
At Grant Thornton House, part of The Terrace precinct, Christchurch property developer Antony Gough is laying out how he sees the future of Ōtautahi Christchurch. He welcomes the idea of Christchurch becoming a Super City, with a vibrant CBD at its heart acting as a magnet for further growth.
"It should happen. To see where we are now, 10 years on from the earthquakes, is incredible. We're well-organised and the City has got legs."
Conventionally dull business attire is not Antony's style and neither is bland property development. The man behind The Terrace – Christchurch's popular riverside hospitality hub – is a colourful soul in every sense with a deep and abiding loyalty to the City. His innate drive to dazzle and inspire is writ large in what he's achieved at The Terrace.
As chair of the Central City Business Association, he played a pivotal role in getting the Re:Start container mall up and going in Cashel St after the February 2011 earthquake. It was a critical first step toward recovery in the CBD. His bigger vision, working within the Blueprint recovery plan, was then to transform the city's riverside waterfront into a multi-million dollar, double-storey layout of bars and eateries, linked by lifts, lanes and air bridges. He and his design team even went to Melbourne with tape measures to make sure the new laneways would be just the right width.
Complemented by offices and generous car parking, it is a vision that has delivered for the City. The first bars here, facing the Ōtākaro/Avon River, opened in 2018. Christchurch without The Terrace – and its eclectic mix of architectural styles – would now be simply unimaginable. "We have a strong concentration of hospitality offerings, all different. There are fantastic ongoing opportunities here, as we keep adding to it, and the retail hospitality area is also very well-serviced for car parking."
Sharing the boardroom with Antony at today's interview is Angelique Bott, operations/property manager at The Terrace, who notes that Antony has recently sold 1000sq m of land "over the back" to fellow local investor Richard Peebles (Riverside, Little High Eatery).
"It's going through council consent at the moment," she says. "It'll be a combination of retail facing Cashel Street Mall and hospitality facing our precinct. Our local investors here really do work together at that operational scale – we're a team. It's all about bringing more people into the City."
Antony agrees, noting that Christchurch's remarkable rebuild and recovery story owes much to its local investor community, including Nick Hunt (BNZ Centre) and Philip Carter (The Crossing). "We should be very thankful to Ballantynes for staying the course too," he says.
While the central City is now much more compact than it was before the earthquakes, Antony sees this as an advantage because everything is so easy to access. He believes it's punchy enough to serve as the beating heart of a new Super City that could include towns like Lincoln, Rolleston, Rangiora and Kaiapoi. He remembers how Christchurch was once ruled by many little competing boroughs and boards, but ultimately a single City council was a much better model. Now, with burgeoning populations to the city's north and south – and with fast commuter links – it's easy for him to glimpse that Super City on the horizon.
Restaurants and bars overlooking the Avon River. Photo / Nancy Zhou
"Becoming a Super City by including the outlying councils like Selwyn and Waimakariri seems like the most sensible thing to me, because at the moment we have too much doubling up on bureaucracy.
Why do we need three mayors and thirty-something councillors when one mayor and 15 or so councillors would do fine?"
With the multi-use arena signed off by the Christchurch City Council, the elephant in the Super City room right now is if neighbouring councils will contribute to the costs. Gough suggests one solution could be to levy a surcharge on tickets for non-locals. He is in no doubt, though, that if Christchurch wants to be competitive as a Super City, then it will have to offer the facilities to match.
Antony is confident the City is heading in the right direction, with its new convention centre (Te Pae) and a new recreation and sport complex also coming next year. "Christchurch Botanic Gardens are an exceptional drawcard too - our Hagley Park is the same size as Central Park in New York!"
