The Things We Will Miss About Christchurch
Christchurch is the city where scientists and soldiers make their last departure to Antarctica. This perhaps indicates how far south the city is, and how we sit on the border between the international community and parochial isolation. It’s easy to hide yourself here. The way the suburbs spread around a weak centre encourages solitude. Christchurch is a grid-like city, with straight lines reflected in its streets, architecture and people. The university specialises in engineering. We’re a community drawn on mathematic exercise books. Lucy and I are leaving Christchurch soon for Wellington, a city which seems more of a life form—lichen colonies in weird corners—than a concrete grid. These are the places and activities in Christchurch we will miss.
Bays: Corsair Bay. This is a bay which seems to have been carved out of the Banks Peninsula especially for families to swim in and picnic around. This photograph of Corsair Bay was taken in the 1920s and the view on a hot summer day today looks almost identical.
Cafés: The Lyttelton Coffee Company. This is a café with tall ceilings, nice staff, interesting music, and bread they bake on site. I don’t know the difference between ‘good’ and ‘average’ coffee so I won’t claim they have great coffee but I’ve heard other people say that Lyttelton Coffee Company’s coffee is nice.
Bars: Bar Antonio’s. Bar Antonio’s, “The smallest bar in Christchurch”, is so insanely and naively kitsch that it’s almost the equivalent of outsider art, in bar form. An outsider bar. It was founded by a Japanese man, Antonio, who moved to Christchurch to pursue windsurfing, snowboarding and flamenco dancing. He started a cultishly successful Japanese restaurant called Osaka (“Cheap but yummy”) and began piano lessons in his mid-60s. If you’re lucky, Antonio will play his interpretation of Celine Dione’s ‘My Heart Will Go On’ on the bar’s digital piano.
Sports: Cycling. Christchurch city is completely flat, with well defined hills surrounding it. So road cycling is totally easy and wind is minimal. This year my route to university passed through two parks (Cranmer Square and Hagley Park) and a native reserve (Dean’s Bush) with generous cycle lanes in between. The pine-plastered hills have some great mountain bike trails as well.
Activities: The Lyttelton market. Lucy and I took a traveller here. Some of the things that were for sale: a box of cassette tapes, a translation of Mein Kampf, a silver Stalin bust, and a miscellaneous iron tool which looked like a long beak with scissor handles. We tasted some super tasty smoked cheese but refrained from buying it as it would have perished in the car’s heat.
Festivals: The Chinese New Year Lantern Festival. Wandering around here I feel like I’m in some anime film. It seems as if a dark/magical-realist adventure is about to pounce onto you in a dark corner.
Architecture: University of Canterbury. Christchurch’s architecture comes in two varieties: gothic revival or brutalism. The University of Canterbury is relentlessly adorned with concrete slabs, forming a village of brutalism which looks not too dissimilar from a gulag. It’s a style that tends to polarise people—it’s rough, dirty and square. Much like Christchurch itself, brutalism is criticised for its precise edges, its utilitarian functions, and its perfunctory materials. But these buildings and the philosophy from which they were built in the 1970s will be the parts of Christchurch we’ll dream about.
