Hi all, this is my first post as a Wel­ling­tonista. There’s a slew of new shops, gal­ler­ies and enter­tain­ment ven­ues open­ing at the moment, so I thought I’d start with a quick roundup.

The Bartley Nees Gal­lery on the corner of Blair and Wake­field streets is under­go­ing mitos­is and split­ting itself into Tim Nees Gal­lery and some­thing call­ing itself Soci­ety of Fash­ion and Art (SOFA for short). The former will be adding some new artists to its roster, includ­ing pho­to­graph­er Rebecca Sha­na­han, whose work appar­ently “expresses still­ness rather than action in cir­cu­lar or sim­ul­tan­eous rather than lin­ear time”. SOFA sounds like it will pretty much do what it says on the tin, selling clothes by Mala Bra­jkovic, Miss Crabb, Cybèle and Lela Jac­obs as well as provid­ing a pro­ject space for loc­al artists. Once this all kicks off on Sat­urday (with a talk by Rebecca Sha­na­han and a video work by Sarah Jane Par­ton) this will turn the Wake­field end of Blair St into a tight little cluster of arty fash­iony archi­tecty good­ness to com­ple­ment the boozi­er ambi­ence of the Cour­tenay end.

For the less fash­ion-con­scious (but pre­sum­ably still well-heeled), Cour­tenay Cent­ral has The Flight Exper­i­ence, a 737 jet sim­u­lat­or. For a mere $95 you can take a 45 minute scen­ic flight of Wel­ling­ton, or at least a bunch of pixels designed to look like Wel­ling­ton. I know that you could actu­ally fly to Christ­ch­urch for less than that, but I guess the abil­ity to fiddle with knobs and joy­sticks is more import­ant than actu­ally get­ting some­where, and you can inten­tion­ally exper­i­ence land­ings like these. Any­way, con­grat­u­la­tions to the pro­moters for get­ting lots of free advert­ising in both the Domin­ion Post and the Cap­it­al Times (and now here). The Cap­it­al Times art­icle includes the pos­sibly sin­is­ter inform­a­tion that if you try to fly into the Majest­ic Centre (per­son­ally I’d go for the NZ Post build­ing on Water­loo Quay) they will “take that to the author­it­ies”.

Pos­sibly aim­ing for a rap­proche­ment between such overt blokeish­ness and the label-con­scious fash­ionis­tas of Blair Street, a new Swanndri store will open tomor­row morn­ing in Hunter Street (between Min­nie Cooper and Keith Math­eson). This is not your typ­ic­al sup­pli­er of bush shirts and gum­boots (a tra­di­tion­al Swanndri stock­ist is Wright­sons in Te Awamutu): no, this is “Swanndri by Kar­en Walk­er”. Struth, mate! A peek in the win­dow reveals suit­ably iron­ic kiwiana decor such as stuffed ducks and antler chan­deliers. Swanndri are clearly aim­ing to do a Bur­berry by trans­form­ing a main­stay of rur­al cloth­ing into urb­an chic, so if Bur­berry is any­thing to go by, the “icon­ic Swanndri check” will be worn by celebs for a couple of years before becom­ing the exclus­ive domain of chavs and Japan­ese tour­ists.