The City to Sea Bridge and its associated public artwork in Wellington is both a treasure and an earthquake risk. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The City to Sea Bridge and its associated public artwork in Wellington is both a treasure and an earthquake risk. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Opinion by Simon Wilson
Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
The bridge was designed by architects John Gray and Rewi Thompson, with sculptor Para Matchitt.
Knocking down the bridge will save the council about $50 million in earthquake-strengthening work.
Wellington! Save the City to Sea Bridge! I know, it’s late in the day and Wellington City Council has already decided the bridge has to go. But the wrecking ball has not yet done its damage and there is still time.
I’m feelingguilty because it’s my home town and I won’t be there, so I know it’s easy for me to say, but honestly, I would chain myself to a wooden seagull if I was.
This isn’t just another bit of old stuff that’s too expensive to keep. The City to Sea Bridge, a pedestrian overpass joining Wellington’s city centre to its waterfront, is a masterpiece.
I’ll go further. I think the bridge, complete with its massive array of mainly wooden sculpting, is the most magnificent public art in the country. It’s one of the few things we have, about which we can say, “This is us, it’s wonderful and it’s unique to us.”
It’s like a haka made out of wood and metal and stone.
It’s our Eiffel Tower, except it’s more important than that, because the Eiffel Tower celebrates 19th-century European engineering and happens to be in France because a Frenchman thought of it.
But the City to Sea Bridge could only be here. It tells us our history and our aspirations: stories of navigation and exploration, of the indigenous people and the settler communities. It represents struggle and achievement. It celebrates artistry and poetry and what you can do with axes and wood. It looks bloody amazing.
It’s a bridge whose whales and seabirds and rough-hewn timber summon the natural world and the legends of our place in it: how we got here and what it’s like to be alive, here on the edge of an enormous ocean.
You walk up the gentle slope from the city, and it’s like you’re on a wave, cresting, as the sea and the waterfront are suddenly revealed before you. You’re flanked by those great creatures of the sea, the whales and the birds, and six pou hoist their symbols of a rich cultural past to the heavens above you, and the beautiful harbour awaits your arrival.
It has wow. Very few things have that much wow.
It is a taonga, in every sense of that much overused word.
The seagulls on the City to Sea Bridge in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
But it’s also an earthquake risk. The bridge doesn’t meet the seismic standards required if there’s a big crowd on it. And if it does collapse, it will block the arterial route essential for emergency services. That’s a risk no responsible council should accept.
Strengthening, the council says, will cost $86m. It’s expensive because it’s on reclaimed land and the piling of the bridge is connected to wider seismic issues in that area. They can’t just prop it up with reinforced steel joists.
Last month, the council agreed to cut $400m from the 10-year budget. There’s pain all over the place in an exercise like that. Last week, knocking down the City to Sea Bridge was added to the list.
The new draft budget is expected to be approved next week for public consultation in March. That consultation will probably not include options for saving the bridge, which citizens should not feel prevents them from writing it in anyway.
There’s strong logic for losing the bridge, but it’s not strong enough.
The whale tails on the City to Sea Bridge, seen from Jervois Quay. Photo / Mark Mitchell
The cost is problematic. It’s already come down once, from $120m. Even knocking the bridge down will cost $36.5m. Some of the work, like reinforcing the sea wall, will have to be done anyway.
The lead contractor when the bridge was built, Trevor Griffiths, finds the stated costs hard to accept. His view: “There’s got to be a clever way of doing this.”
I’ve watched Auckland Council handle issues like this. The staff consider the matter, usually in depth, but once they recommend an option they can be very hard to budge. Their mindset often becomes: “We already know best.”
In Wellington, everyone seems to agree it would be good to keep the bridge, so the dispute is only about whether they can afford to. Perhaps, given what’s at stake, they need a really vigilant process to ensure no option has been left unexplored.
“Give me a call,” Griffiths told the council. They should do that.
Beyond its aesthetic audacity and the thrill many people get just being on it, why is this bridge so important?
In the 1980s, architects John Gray and Rewi Thompson won the commission for a new pedestrian overbridge to connect the city to the waterfront and at the same time express something about the bicultural nature of the place. They brought in sculptors, and notably Paratene Matchitt.
Even then, it was unusual to give Māori artists such a central role.
Gray, Thompson, Matchitt and the others, they didn’t hold back. There’s a split pyramid at the highest point with a pounamu tip representing Te Wai Pounamu, from which Māui cast his net to catch Te Ika a Māui (the North Island), his fish. A complex brick paving fan represents the net.
Matchitt carved the wooden sculptures that form the balustrades. Two whales, Ngake and Whātaitai, are the taniwha who, we’re told, opened the harbour to the sea. A pair of seagulls represent welcome and festivity.
At the top of the concourse he planted six wooden pou, topped by celestial and other metal shapes. They commemorate the navigation skills of our earliest voyagers, echoing the symbols on the Te Wepu flag captured by Te Kooti from Ngāti Kahungunu in 1868.
That flag, made by nuns and nearly 16m long, was captured again by the colonial soldier Gilbert Mair, who gifted it to a museum, which then cut it up to use as dusters.
Anna Marie White from Toi Māori Aotearoa – Māori Arts NZ has suggested Matchitt’s celestial pou make “a stand for tino rangatiratanga in the present moment”.
Para Matchitt's celestial pou on the City to Sea Bridge in Wellington. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Matchitt, who’s dead now, was a great artist but he was not a good man. He was convicted of sexual abuse and went to jail for it. There’s no glossing over it, but I want to say his work should not be diminished because of that.
On the seaward side, the bridge drops away almost precipitously, with slabs of concrete overlapping each other, mirroring the quake-prone landform. There are hardwood timbers from the original wharves and everywhere you look, little features of idiosyncratic interest, nooks and crannies to sit, read, talk, shelter from the wind that occasionally blows.
The bridge invites its visitors to take pleasure in the muddle of stuff. It celebrates rough-hewn reality over polished “perfection”, the everyday over the expensive. It invites us to sit and enjoy the sweep of harbour and hills and history.
Am I reading too much into it? I don’t think so.
You can’t save everything. You shouldn’t want to. Cities are not museums and, for the record, we need to build affordable housing far more than we need to keep all the villas.
But as we develop and grow and keep cutting costs, the question to ask in all our cities is, “What true treasures do we have?” Wellington’s Begonia House, also due for demolition, obviously fails that test.
The City to Sea Bridge exists because, 35 years ago, some great local architects – Ian Athfield, Stuart Gardyne, Stuart Niven, Gray and others – were put to work to create a new civic square.
Car parks and formally planted beds of marigolds were replaced by a large, beguilingly asymmetrical public space. The beautifully spruced-up town hall, said to be one of the finest lyric theatres in the world, lined one side.
Athfield’s astonishing new library, with its nikau palm pillars, spilled into the square down with a wide set of stairs; the old library was transformed by Gardyne and Niven into the new home of the City Gallery.
Sculptor Neil Dawson’s “Ferns”, a giant stainless-steel globe of interlaced silver ferns, floated above.
They had a Labour mayor, who shared the vision and inspired the process: Jim Belich, the father of historian James Belich and grandfather of James’ niece, the Labour list MP Camilla Belich.
That vision was superb and the bridge was part of it. The fact it was built at all speaks to a very special confluence: of civic authorities, inspired architects and artists, public engagement, iwi involvement, all if it.
We don’t manage to do this very often. Never, to my knowledge, in Auckland. Not in Christchurch, the city where it should have been easiest, in the earthquake rebuild.
Sadly, almost every other part of that vision has failed earthquake testing and is now gobbling up enormous amounts of money. Only the bridge remains, for the moment.
It points to a failure of process. Those other buildings are lovely, but none of them is special in the way the bridge is special. In the big replanning of what will become Te Ngākau Civic Square, the bridge should have been the priority, not the afterthought.
Cutting budgets is very hard. But when things can be delayed or scaled back, that’s not the worst. City building is always a work in progress and you can’t always go as fast as you want.
Destroying the things that are magnificent and unique and make us into us, that’s another category. When they’re gone, that’s it.
I mentioned the Eiffel Tower. When it was proposed, almost nobody except Monsieur Eiffel wanted it. The artists and writers and intellectuals of France, an extremely formidable bunch, tried hard to stop it. Hilarious to think of, now.
Imagine if Paris had to face the same predicament as Wellington today: Mon dieu, they say, the Eiffel Tower has to be strengthened or it might fall over and kill us. But that will be expensive, and we don’t actually need the tower for anything, it’s just a nice-to-have, so we will knock it down.
So come on Nicola Willis, finance minister, Wellington MP, person with influence and, presumably, some claim to civic responsibility. What about it?
There’s a plaque on the bridge, with lines by the Wellington poet Lauris Edmond: “It’s true you can’t live here by chance, you have to do and be, not simply watch or even describe. This is the city of action, the world headquarters of the verb.”
Do it. Save the bridge.
Rough-hewn and artistry: the bridge with so much going on. Photo / Mark Mitchell
