There’s been a lot of talk about the death of Wellington ever since John Key opened his cat-flap back in 2013. “Wellington is dying” he said, but facing a media backlash, he promptly back-tracked and did an about-face, instead claiming that central Gov did not know how to help make it better. Since then we have had the conundrum of multiple left-leaning Mayors leading an ostensibly right-leaning city (business owners and Government tenants) lived in by a rabidly leftist population (ref to the People’s Republic of Aro Valley, and others). But instead of dwelling on the downsides, let’s look at the upsides.
Great things about Wellington include:
Great harbour!
Great compact city!
Great walkable city!
Great architectural history!
Great cultural landscape, full of poetry, plays, books, music, art, sculpture, dance, theatre, audio-visual, performance, and many more.
Great food outlets! So many restaurants!! So many good ones! And so many more!
Great drink outlets! Including, according to the fable of Well Urban, some 362 different places to buy a Martini cocktail, and of course so many breweries for craft beer.
Great coffee! Including more places to buy a coffee at than there are grains of sand in the desert – well, Oriental Bay beach.
Great nearby natural parks and features, including the Inner and Outer Town Belts, the Island Bay Marine Reserve, the Kapiti Coast, the Wairarapa, the Marlborough Sounds within easy reach, and so on.
Helen Milner, a branding expert (and a really nice friendly person), posted an article online the other day about how good Wellington is, looking back at it from a future viewpoint of 2040, and that was picked up by Stuff and the Dom Post – sorry, the Post. She emphasised that Wellington is just having a little cup of tea and a lie-down, and that it is in no way dead or dying.
I’m not going anywhere! How about you?
Looks like our AI Overlords intend to abolish Oriental Bay altogether, thus significantly shortening the trip from the Beehive to the airport. I wonder, though, will that affect coffee availability?
I should confess that Helen Milner did say that she tried hard to get a good view of Wellington in the future, but that Chat GPT insisted on re-siting the Beehive in a different location.
Damn thing has a mind of its own !!! :-)
How does my list of Wellington high points compare to somewhere else, say, perhaps, Gonville? Because there are those that are saying that Wellington itself is Goneville…
And there is this: https://www.stuff.co.nz/nz-news/350426775/clock-ticking-wfh-era-its-not-just-about-reviving-wellington
This just out, and it is noticeable that we are NOT on the list, save for one:
The top 10 fine dining restaurants in NZ:
1. The Grove Restaurant, Auckland
2. Sails Restaurant, Auckland
3. Jervois Steak House, Queenstown
4. Logan Brown, Wellington
5. Craggy Range Restaurant, Havelock North
6. Rata, Queenstown
7. Ahi, Auckland
8. Sidart, Auckland
9. Paris Butter, Auckland
10. Mudbrick Vineyard and Restaurant, Waiheke Island
Actually, on that point, during the Covid times (still ongoing, incidentally), while it was great that Jacinda and Grant managed to save the economy from total destruction during those months of lock-down, in reality (and ever more so in hindsight), it may have been more realistic to just say:
“At least half of all hospitality businesses are going to go out of business over the next few years, so figure out who your favourites are, and let the rest go to the wall.”
Cos that is what has happened. Harsh, but true. But the cruel thing about trying to save ALL of our favourites, is that it forces all of the hospo folk to have to scrap it out for much reduced custom. So they are ALL even more likely to go broke. One by one – and with another bunch about to go broke in the coming week – we are losing our best hospo joints.
How long, for instance, before Logan Brown is wiped from the face of the earth?
Yet, I’m betting that McDonalds will weather the storm for years to come…
It is just the shitty options that will remain…
I starting visiting Wellington in the 1970s and then moved there in the early 80s. Let me tell you, it was really shit then. And I loved it. There were empty buildings for studios, squats and band practice rooms, There were cheap late-night cafes that wouldn’t get health department stars, let alone Michelin ones. All the boring people crammed into the railway station and left us alone at 5.00pm every day.
Cities wax and wane over time and different people value them at different phases of their evolution.Has anybody asked people under 30 if they think plummeting commercial occupancy and rents are a problem or an opportunity?