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I weave through con­crete islands and met­al bar­ri­ers to the edge of the Basin Reserve. Just inside the fence is a mon­u­ment to William Wake­field: as an abduc­tion accom­plice, mer­ce­nary, prin­ci­pled duelist and city father, he was the mar­gin­al­ly more respectable of the Wake­field boys. The memo­r­i­al is sup­posed to sug­gest a Gre­cian tem­ple, but on a shrunk­en scale, and the geom­e­try could just as well evoke rur­al water tow­ers or alien octopodes. Far from sym­bol­is­ing time­less dig­ni­ty, its his­to­ry is as dubi­ous and peri­patet­ic as its name­sake. After ship­ping out from the moth­er coun­try, it lan­guished for decades in the cor­po­ra­tion yard before its first instal­la­tion, and has con­tin­ued to shift in and out of the grounds ever since.

The William Wakefield Memorial

The Basin itself is a site of com­pro­mise and thwart­ed ambi­tions. The 1855 earth­quake kai­boshed any hopes of a grand inland har­bour sur­round­ed by docks and fac­to­ries, and ever since the Mt Cook con­victs drained the rem­nant swamps and and flat­tened them into play­ing fields, the reserve has been sub­ject­ed to shrink­ing and nib­bling, as the noble ideals of civic recre­ation adjust to the demands of move­ment. The sharp edges have been shaved off, first to suit the turn­ing radii of trams, then to appease the ever-hun­gry high­way that now encir­cles it in an asphalt tourni­quet.

The changes have not all been smooth, and the Basin has seen its share of revolt. The grounds were stormed by union­ists dur­ing the Great Strike of 1913, mak­ing it a brief sym­bol­ic cen­tre for resis­tance — in a away, the wharves did come to the Basin for a while. Side-street graf­fi­ti con­tin­ues the strug­gle, though the words seem more stri­dent than effec­tu­al: POWER CORRUPTS! SOD THE STREETS! CAPITALISM CANNOT LAST. Is the bar­ren site behind, ear­marked for a brand new super­mar­ket, a sign of capitalism’s fatal stum­ble? Or is the great weary beast just tak­ing a breather before get­ting back to its feet and back into tram­pling mode?

Capitalism cannot last - Basin Reserve graffiti

The road keeps snaking on, leav­ing an awk­ward geom­e­try of con­cave tri­an­gles and apolo­getic land­scap­ing. Among the fumes, the sticky, shim­mer­ing asphalt and the brazen archi­tec­tur­al medi­oc­rity of motels and hos­tels, a small crenel­lat­ed build­ing strikes an anom­alous note of embat­tled whim­sy. The defen­sive archi­tec­ture seems at odds with its his­to­ry as Moth­er Aubert’s Home of Com­pas­sion, but per­haps it will indeed have to dig itself in for anoth­er siege. While NZTA are tight-lipped about cur­rent fly­over options, it seems like­ly that this bijoux cas­tle will be (lit­er­al­ly) in the road. As St Pat’s col­lege got the elbow in the 60s, exiled to Kil­birnie to make way for a still­born motor­way, per­haps this last rem­nant will also be shoved aside. With its con­text so muta­ble, what’s to keep it root­ed to this par­tic­u­lar piece of earth?

Buck­le St unbuck­les, straight­ens, and brings itself to a stop at the Tory St inter­sec­tion. This is the first inter­sec­tion of the jour­ney that retains the geom­e­try of William Mein Smith’s orig­i­nal town plan: since the tun­nel, every oth­er cor­ner has been tweaked and twist­ed to unkink the high­way. Now I’m stand­ing at the edge of the Te Aro grid, the rec­ti­lin­ear order that marks the begin­ning of the true city. A grid plan is at the heart of most planned cities, not just from the ratio­nal­ist Greeks and Romans to the spec­u­la­tive sub­di­viders of the New World, but in Baby­lon, Chi­na and ancient Mex­i­co as well. Occult psy­cho­geo­g­ra­phers scour maps for earth mag­ic, ley lines and cab­bal­is­tic align­ments; medi­ae­val towns reveal traces of old graz­ing paths and hill­top defences; but for planned set­tle­ments on flat land, the geo­met­ric DNA of the future city is most often con­ceived by a sur­vey­or with a set square.

Per­haps there’s more to it. A grid is a giv­en, but why this align­ment? North-south streets don’t quite run north to south, and the shad­ows in the west-east streets often catch you unaware when the sun sets fur­ther south than you’d imag­ine. For Mein Smith, crouched in his leaky hut, try­ing to cram the man­dat­ed town acres onto a con­fined and fold­ed land, cer­tain fea­tures must have set the ground rules. To the west, the base of the Ter­race escarp­ment run­ning north to Clay Point; high to the east, the long ridge of Tan­gi Te Keo; Wai­t­an­gi Stream run­ning from New­town to the sea along the line of what was to become Cam­bridge and Kent Ter­races. Once the y‑axis was set, the rest of the grid fell into place. But what cre­at­ed that arrange­ment of par­al­lel geolo­gies? As usu­al, the answer is seis­mic: a series of small, inac­tive faults run across Te Aro, par­al­lel to what are now the major streets between Willis St and Kent Tce. Who needs the imag­ined forces of ley lines, when we have the very real force of fault lines defin­ing the skele­ton of the city?

Anoth­er fault now defines the east-west align­ments — ten­sions com­pound­ing over decades — with signs that the pent-up ener­gy is final­ly ready to burst: the high­way. The north edge of Buck­le St now bris­tles with sheds, machin­ery, heavy met­al fences. The earth­mov­ing is about to begin, attempt­ing to bring at least tem­po­rary res­o­lu­tion to the con­flict between two incom­pat­i­ble visions of “Nation­al Sig­nif­i­cance”: the tra­di­tion of defin­ing our nation­hood by remem­ber­ing those who died for us in dis­tant lands; and the the hunger for move­ment, the cease­less dri­ve towards else­where. The still­ness of mem­o­ry ver­sus the motion of com­merce. Each of them in its own way eludes the here and now, yet the con­cepts of memo­r­i­al pomp and diur­nal com­mut­ing seem irrec­on­cil­able. No-one’s being told the even­tu­al res­o­lu­tion. Will the street buck­le north­wards, will it be sub­duct­ed beneath Memo­r­i­al Park, or will the high­way, almost incon­ceiv­ably, be hushed a few times a year for pre-ordained rit­u­als of remem­brance? For now, the cracks will be plas­tered over with lime chip and pha­lanx­es of tem­po­rary nurs­eries: ten­sions unre­lieved.

This cor­ner abounds with such con­tra­dic­tions. To the north: Mt Cook School, divorced from its epony­mous moun­tain; and block or so away the for­mer milk depot, a reminder of the days of benign­ly patro­n­is­ing munic­i­pal social­ism when a Coun­cil-owned dairy farm in Ota­ki would pro­vide for the fat and cal­ci­um require­ments of urban urchins. To the south: the Police bar­racks with their tell­tale prison bricks, a reminder of the old Mt Cook Gaol that used to lour over Te Aro. Among its pris­on­ers were the “plough­men from Par­i­ha­ka”, reward­ed with depor­ta­tion and incar­cer­a­tion for their peace­ful resis­tance to colo­nial encroach­ment.

The tan­gled cur­rents swirl on down the street. The benign insti­tu­tions of uni­ver­si­ty, muse­um and memo­r­i­al hide unmapped air-raid shel­ters, a botched panop­ti­con, forced labour, a decap­i­tat­ed moun­tain and long-lost Pukeahu Pa. Streets now dec­o­rat­ed with gen­tle knit­ted graf­fi­ti once saw machine-guns sta­tioned on bar­ri­cades to intim­i­date strik­ers, and in St Martin’s Square riot­ers smashed the win­dows of Muldoon’s SIS snoop HQ. Unknown war­riors.

Statue inside the National War Memorial

Arthur Street pro­vides a respite from the den­si­ty of his­to­ry. It may be grim (“tem­po­rary” grav­el traps, seg­re­gat­ed sli­planes, Chi­nese can­teens, light-indus­tri­al broth­els), but it allows the psychogeographer’s over­heat­ed brain a time to decom­press from Buck­le Street’s mil­i­taris­tic over­load. One step after anoth­er; sun and asphalt; the vehic­u­lar pulse. It’s a wel­come breather before the tan­gled knots of the Cuba Street cor­ner.

This­tle Hall announces that it’s “look­ing to the future with pro­gres­sive ideals”, but the names of the new (sec­ond hand) shops that are slow­ly re-inhab­it­ing this dam­aged inter­sec­tion betray a more ambiva­lent atti­tude to time’s arrow: Aeon, Par­ti­cles of Time. Era­sure in the guise of preser­va­tion: shops and cot­tages were shunt­ed, refur­bished and in some cas­es rebuilt to form a “her­itage precinct”, but it’s a blink­ered “her­itage” that cel­e­brates colo­nial­ism while white­wash­ing liv­ing his­to­ry. Transit’s twee lit­tle pot­ted his­to­ries, now van­ish­ing from the win­dows as urban life returns, petered out in the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, pass­ing over the pol­i­tics, cul­ture, art and strug­gles of the Upper Cuba most of us remem­ber. Only the for­mer Free­dom Shop retained signs of that resis­tance: on an inte­ri­or wall that was yet to be sand­ed clean, a few stick­ers remained, includ­ing the infa­mous black bloc chant “Cap­i­tal­ism? No thanks! We will burn your fuck­ing banks!” That too is now gone.

On the oth­er cor­ner of what was once Tonks Ave, graf­fi­ti has been paint­ed over in brown, only to be swift­ly re-tagged in white. Few now would recog­nise the graf­fi­to that stood here for years, except as the name of a new band: “WILL TOBIAS”. Few­er still would remem­ber the full text, extend­ing down across the road. Not a name but a ques­tion — “WILL TOBIAS DEFECT?” — won­der­ing whether “token” black Spring­bok Errol Tobias would make a run for it in 1981. The words lin­gered long after the ques­tion had been answered (in the neg­a­tive), and though the text and its mean­ing have final­ly van­ished, the walls still con­jure the lan­guage of the streets.

Karo Dri­ve takes off on its arro­gant bend, slash­ing through the grid of all this Local Insignif­i­cance, send­ing hous­es scut­tling away from its jagged edge. Marooned between an emp­ty nano-park and the atavism of Tonks’ Well (bricks and weeds fes­ter­ing below glass), Regan Gentry’s instal­la­tion Sub­ject to Change is more apt­ly named than its cre­ator could have imag­ined. Orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed for the Arthur St cor­ner (unwant­ed by This­tle Hall), and then for Willis St (reject­ed by Tran­sit), it end­ed up here after a long chain of com­pro­mis­es. Which just under­lines the sub­ver­sive­ness of this inten­tion­al­ly skewed pas­tiche of local archi­tec­tur­al tropes: emp­ty, func­tion­less, skele­tal, sub­tly yet fatal­ly fail­ing to con­nect with either van­ished grid or new-hewn path — in a place such as this, what could be more site-spe­cif­ic than a sculp­ture that was intend­ed for else­where?

Karo Drive

The Dri­ve pass­es acoustic bar­ri­ers, bare­ly-exor­cised ghost towns, the gut­ted shell of an incon­ve­nient cot­tage. It’s still a raw gash in the urban flesh, and the sky pours in through its breach. The arte­r­i­al open­ness is alien to Welling­ton: it could be the out­skirts of Tau­ran­ga or Christchurch, a peri-urban flat­land. Where the half-arsed high­way col­lides with Vic­to­ria St (Wellington’s orig­i­nal Franken­stein St, bodged togeth­er from the sev­ered limbs of unre­lat­ed streets) the results were always bound to be messy, and the car­nage has reduced parts of Willis and Abel Smith Streets to bleed­ing stumps. Behind the rem­nants of a com­mu­ni­ty gar­den, a sten­cilled Darth Vad­er puz­zles over Rubik’s Cube.

After a day’s hot trek togeth­er, the high­way and I have to part. As the bypass swoops down into its con­crete trench, those trav­el­ling under mere human pow­er are nudged out onto side paths. From here on, it will be a mat­ter of weav­ing around, over and some­times under the road, strik­ing a bal­ance between the des­ig­nat­ed Nation­al Sig­nif­i­cance of State High­way 1 and the unsign­post­ed sig­nif­i­cant notions that gath­er around its mar­gins.