Historic Hawkes Bay: Creative use for quake rubble

After the 1931 Hawke's Bay Earthquake, tonnes of building rubble were removed from the CBDs of Hastings and Napier. In Hastings, I understand most of the rubble was dumped around the St Leonard's Park area. Some practical use, however, was made of part of the rubble, for example, many of the bricks from the collapsed Hastings Grand Hotel were used for laying garden paths for residential homes in Hastings and Havelock North.

One especially creative use of the rubble was made by Hastings Borough Council employee Ernest Garnett (1891-1959).

Garnett took some of the rubble and designed and created small decorative walls, seats, bridges and water fountains in Cornwall Park and Windsor Park, many in the style of Art Deco, and most exist today.

Creativity and construction ran in Albert's family with his father James Garnett (a past Hastings mayor) being a builder, and his brother Albert an architect, who practised in Hastings.

The Hastings Methodist Church also turned rubble of their wrecked church into perimeter walls, which can be seen outside the front of the property in Hastings and Heretaunga Streets.

Rush-Munro's in Heretaunga Street West has rubble-styled walls, which are likely to have been made from the 1931 earthquake ruins.

Frederick Rush-Munro shifted to that location from a CBD shop, which was wrecked in the earthquake.

As the Christchurch Cathedral is being demolished after suffering extensive damage from their earthquakes; following the example of Ernest Garrett in using the old church rubble and salvaged effects to form part of the new cathedral would provide an element of the phoenix rising from the ruins; a symbol used often in Hastings.