Wellington: Positively a cool town

By PETER CALDER

For what it's worth - and to Wellingtonians who must be among the world's worst grumblers about the weather, it is probably worth next to nothing - I've known only beautiful days in the capital.

Well, almost only. One late summer, I stood on the waterfront around where Para Matchitt's magnificently unruly city-to-sea bridge crosses Jervois Quay and I leant into the southerly.

The lean was literal. At 45 degrees off the vertical I should assuredly have pitched forward on my face. But to stand upright was to ask to sit, or be seated, abruptly. At 30 degrees, it was almost perfect, not leaning so far forward that the rain, whipped to long, horizontal shards by the wind, would get under my collar.

But the connection with the earth seemed more tenuous than I'd ever known it. It felt like I need only spread my arms and my capacious raincoat would become like Icarus' wings. Before I knew it I might be in the Hutt Valley or even the Wairarapa.

Any Wellingtonian would nod glumly at that. The city was named New Zealand's top town by North and South magazine, but it takes only a few minutes in the city to get them complaining about the weather.

"Nice day," I kept saying when I dropped in for three days on the place in the first week in December. The sky was improbably blue - verging on cobalt really - and the breeze from the south was gentle, just enough to cool midday strollers and whisk away the traffic fumes.

"Won't last," would come the reply, or "You should have seen last week; it was a shocker."

I hadn't seen the last week but when I tell Wellingtonians that I've spent around 60 days in the city in my life and 55 of them have been perfect, they shake their heads, not in disbelief but pityingly, amazed that I could be so easily deluded.

This self-consciousness about the weather - a sort of climatic cringe - is one of the less endearing characteristics of Wellingtonians (another is the sense that they should be in charge of everything, but more of that later). The afternoon newspaper tries to talk everyone's mood up with a front page weather spot which says simply "Ho, hum. Just another perfect day in the capital." But even when the sun is out, the folks down there are determined to prepare for the worst. They scurry between buildings, fleeing the foul weather that cannot be far away.

It seems like another country or at least another era. The trolley buses in the inner-city routes still suck juice from the tangled network of overhead wires - in Auckland we ripped ours down in the 1980s. The traffic lights chirrup loudly on the "Cross Now" signal. And people walk.

There are pleasures to be had in the walking. The city's attractions are crowded close together - you can walk its length, from the Embassy at the top of Courtenay Place, say, to the Beehive at the foot of Lambton Quay in less than 20 minutes. And small miracles happen on the way: the geometric puzzle of grass, tile and water which is Pigeon Park, outside the opera house or Neil Dawson's perfect silver-fern globe suspended above Civic Square - a real- traffic-free plaza which puts one in mind of a town in France.

Beside it Auckland's windswept expanses of square - colonised mainly by skateboarders or street merchants - seem drab and forlorn.

Even the ruins are celebrated. What was Circa Theatre's old HQ, on the corner of Harris St, is now a small green space. But the stumpy remnants of the brick walls and the tiled entrance remain, encircling the park, forming a faux grand entrance which incidentally becomes a sly comment on urban renewal.

Much of Wellington's charm is conferred by its topography. The hills hem it in, hold it close to the water's edge, prevent it from outgrowing itself. As a result, its population of less than 170,000 makes it more of a village than a city. And walking everywhere - even in that shocking weather the city is noted for - is more of a pleasure than a chore.

"I like the compactness of the place," says Lindsay Shelton, marketing director for the New Zealand Film Commission, who strolls down from his Mt Victoria apartment the few hundred metres along the waterfront to his Wakefield St office each morning. "If you go to a meeting, you walk and you meet two or three people you know on the way."

It's what makes the city less like a city than a town. Shelton says he routinely finds himself introducing two Aucklanders to each other - he knows both of them but they've never met each other, even when they work.

There's a faintly gloating note in the announcement on Mayor Mark Blumsky's voicemail. "I'm out and about in New Zealand's top town at the moment so I'm having too good a time." At this point the voice hesitates, its owner seeming to sense that he's backed himself into a syntactic cul de sac which can only be completed with the words "to talk to the likes of you." He takes evasive action and asks you to leave a message.

I catch up with him later at the Renouf Tennis Centre high on the Brooklyn hills where he sits and watches his six-year-old daughter's weekly tennis lesson.

"She's a city kid," he says, proudly. "She loves the city and she feels at home there." [It's something the girl herself confirms later as her dad gives me a lift downtown. Her friends' back lawns, she says, impress her not at all; she likes being able to wave from her fourth-floor apartment balcony to her dad as he comes into the council chamber across the street.]

Blumsky, a former shoe merchant, attracts his share of criticism from ratepayers and pressure groups who regard him as something of a gladhanding lightweight. But there's no denying he is in charge of a city on a roll. The "Absolutely, Positively Wellington" campaign which started, amid much derision from the north, during the mayoral term of Fran Wilde has fired the local public imagination.

Blumsky found that the hotels bulging with business folk during the week emptied out at weekends so he sought aggressively to market the city as a weekend destination, a place, as he puts it, "to spend, eat and sleep."

The "Send Yourself To Wellington" campaign was the result and when North and South joined in with its "top town" nomination, the city councillors rejoiced. Now the city is busy branding itself as "New Zealand's hottest urban destination."

The branding ads are plastered over a shot of Woodward St, a cricket-pitch-length lane which leads down from The Terrace to Lambton Quay. It looks virtually deserted and vaguely windswept and Aucklanders may compare it with Ponsonby Rd on any weeknight and chortle at Wellingtonians' presumption in dubbing their city "hot." Blumsky is unrepentant.

"We have a city which people have ownership of and are proud of," he says. "I don't think Aucklanders know what their city is. If you asked 100 people in the Wellington region whether they had been into the city, how many would say yes? 100. Now what about if you asked 100 Aucklanders?"

For all that ownership, Wellington may have a way to go before it can claim that it's particularly hot - or even particularly urban. Courtenay Place, the city's restaurant strip (and bus terminal), certainly has big-city pretensions to judge by the waiting staff in the cafes who do more waiting than work and stand around looking bored and gorgeous in their short black aprons while preening their frosted hair. But there's a yawning hole of waste ground in the middle of it, fenced in by sheets of plywood which proclaim that it will become "Courtenay Central." Ah, a shopping mall. Now there's an idea for a city centre.

It's along its waterfront that Wellington seems the most uncertain. On a good day - of which, I am told, they have so few - Wellington has the most spectacular of the country's harbours, ringed by slopes which sprout homes and apartments. But it's cut off from the city centre by the snarling, four-lane speedway of Jervois Quay. That Wellingtonians experience it as a kind of separation was proven by the failure of the waterfront shopping precinct in sheds which now house Shell's head office - and an events centre which few people seem to have a good word to say about.

What remains are long expanses of concrete runway which seem to belong to skaters, scooters, cyclists and joggers. But the city which calls so many of its streets quays seems oddly disconnected from the water. The council's plans to develop the waterfront ran into well-organised opposition from groups who reckon buildings will block harbour views and reduce access. Watch that space.

For all it's "hot city" pretensions, Wellington might be better - and certainly more honest - depicting itself as a cool town. A village even. There are plenty of us Aucklanders who tire of the way so much of national life - cultural life in particular - is run by people from a town the size of a decent suburb in Waitakere. They constitute a cabal as powerful as any mafia - and their lives seem so self-absorbed we wonder if the expression about "life beyond the Bombay Hills" ought to change to "life beyond the Rimutakas."

An Aucklander of my acquaintance, forced by family circumstance to live in the capital, still hasn't got over the dinner-party conversations: a senior public-sector executive complains his job is boring and someone else says she has a friend who fancies a move. Half an hour and a bottle of Martinborough pinot noir later the rearrangement has been decided on - and by the end of the week it's a fait accompli.

That's the way they do things in villages - not in cities.

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