Rudman's city: University plan to demolish historic houses kept secret

By BRIAN RUDMAN

Auckland University fights hard for the right to free speech and open debate - except when it wants to demolish the odd historic building or three. Then, like any other property developer, it tries to avoid any unpleasantness by keeping the process as secret as it can.

Today the professors have their fingers crossed hoping Auckland City will grant their wish to knock down three old houses at the corner of Symonds and Alfred Sts without any public consultation. The two threatened Symonds St merchant houses are listed as category 2 buildings by the Historic Places Trust, but are not scheduled as historic on the city's district plan.

To be built on the prime corner site is a four-storey student amenities and electronic library block.

Making the decision today will be planning commissioners councillors Kay McKelvie and Juliet Yates. This is their second go at it. A week ago, when it came before them along with a recommendation from senior council planners Earl Brookbanks and Mark Vinall that approval be given on a non-notified basis, the commissioners expressed their discomfort with the recommendation and adjourned their decision until today.

Councillors McKelvie and Yates, you might recall, got it in the neck just over a year ago when it was revealed they had been the commissioners who permitted the AMP's waterfront skyscraper, now nearing completion, to proceed on the same non-notification basis. We'll know, later today, whether the widespread public disquiet about the secrecy surrounding such planning decisions has got through to the two decision-makers.

The council planners are recommending that permission be given on a non-notified basis because the two requirements for this under section 94 of the Resource Management Act have been met. These are that the effect of the project be "minor" and that all affected people have been given the opportunity to say so.

In the case of heritage buildings, one could well argue that every citizen is affected and has the right to comment. In this case, council officials are arguing that they have the blessing of the Historic Places Trust for what is being proposed. And in this case, the Historic Places Trust is acting on your and my behalf.

After the trust's strange behaviour over the old Central Post Office, I, for one, have strong reservations about whether the trust represents anyone's ideas but its own. And weird they can sometimes be.

Someone once observed that a camel was a horse designed by a committee. The interior of the old CPO will have a similar oddness about it, with a raised platform in the middle of the concourse at the insistence of the Historic Places Trust to symbolically represent the old banking chamber floor.

In the case of the old "protected" merchant houses, symbolism has taken another form. The trust will give its blessing to their removal on condition that a conservation architect be retained to draw up "a set of measured drawings" of each place and to prepare "a full archival black and white photographic record of the interior, exterior and surrounds of the building [s]."

Just how such a death mask process helps to preserve our past escapes me. Perhaps the hope is that in a more enlightened age, or on some parallel universe, these carefully measured records will enable the places to be recreated.

Of course I shouldn't be too hard on the trust. The only weapon it has is persuasion. If its bluff is called, it has to either front up and pay market value for the property in question, or butt out. And, of course, it doesn't have any money for the first option.

As inner-city, late 19th-century merchant houses go, these may not be the finest examples remaining. But they are part of a cluster that remind us of our city's past. The wealthy families who lived in them are still part of the city. Newspaper owner Henry Brett lived in one, for example.

As the guardian and repository of our culture, it is incongruous that it should be the university that is planning to be out with pickaxes and crowbars while the city sleeps, hacking away at our historic remains.

It is to be hoped that the commissioners today will at least force the professors to justify their plans in public.