[See all Notional Significance posts] The entry to Bolton St cemetery is unremarkable: a gap in a white fence off a respectable street, a canopy of pines, plain crosses against a corrugated iron fence. But I know that I’m passing into a territory that would have the earth-magic wing of the psychogeographical movement panting with […]
The path, from tilted field down into the motorway chasm, winds past richly-tagged garage walls and rear fences. In my mind, I think that Oak Park Avenue was once like this — dark brick, spalling concrete, crunching gravel, rusting corrugate — but I no longer trust my memory as anything other than a synthesis of sensations and […]
It’s been the better part of a year since we wrote about the Regional Council’s Real Time Passenger Information project. GPS units are now being fitted to a growing subset of Go Wellington buses (other companies to follow soon), so that their real-time positions can be used to calculate exact “time to arrival” information for […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] The path sidles away from the road. To my left, and indeed to almost everyone’s left, is Wellington’s radical headquarters, 128 Abel Smith St. It’s well over three years since the shattering dawn when police smashed down the door, seeking evidence of so-called “terror camps”, but the Urewera 18 are […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] 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 […]
[See all Notional Significance posts] As I approach the tunnel mouth, I can’t help but notice the looming cliff to my right. I try to imagine the promised/threatened second tunnel, and the impact that its eastern portal will have on the landscape. I envision a giant tunnel-boring mole bursting from the mountainside, like one of […]
National significance begins with a roundabout: from the air it looks like a navel, the axis of the world, the green Omphalos where one begins. But what is beginning here? There’s a distinct impression that more traffic comes from the eastern suburbs via Broadway than from the airport itself, which would make this a somewhat […]
Before reaching the starting point of the journey, I need to take a preliminary journey, from something resembling the heart of the city to the start of the highway: the airport. That in itself tells us something about just where cities fit into the whole “National Significance” agenda. A city is never an end in […]
It’s been a long time coming, but finally the buses are running through the thoroughfare formerly known as Manners Mall. With clipped bus wing mirrors, bowled down pedestrians, and general chaos predicted by some, I decided to get down to Manners Street and check out the new bus route.
This category is a bit of a mixed bag. It’s where we put things that we want to celebrate that didn’t seem to fit anywhere else, but that doesn’t mean these nominations are second thoughts. Indeed, they’re actually the some of the first things we think of when we try to define what makes Wellington […]