RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33904, 25 July 1975, Page 14

RANDOM REMINDER

SERMON IN STONE

The dreaming spires of the University of Canterbury town site charmed generations students, townsfolk, and visitors. Many details of the Gothic architecture, such as the arches flanking the main quadrangle on the south and east, were not visible from the road but there were still many chains of street frontage with a satisfying display of stone work. In the days between the wars when motor traffic in Christchurch was a tentative mutter rather than a defiant roar, a stroll down Worcester Street from the Square to the museum was regarded as a logical and civilised act instead of a prime example of eccentricity and even foolhardiness with four main thoroughfares to cross, two of them one-way streets. When this walk was made before the war the

whole of the Worcester Street frontage of the university was revealed as the architects had intended it. Then the war was over and the great acceleration in the thirst for knowledge which followed had begun. At once the university on its old site became too small for its student numbers and research activities and the temporary buildings known as prefabs were installed in the recesses. The most alarming of these were two which dominated the Worcester Street frontage and were all that the dying species known as strollers could remember of the university on their journey from the Square to the museum. The contrast between the mellow beauty of the Gothic stone and the frank hideousness of the squat prefabs was an impact interesting in its own way but it was not

one, the authorities recognised, worth preserving. Native shrubs and trees were planted round the prefabs, a happy if slowmaturing choice. In the course of the next 30 years the evergreen natives blossomed to their full stature, effectively shrouding the temporary prefabs and largely causing them to be forgotten. At this point the prefabs were taken away. What was left was a raw and tattered area — scarred earth, a fringe of lank grass, broken foundations, and’ natives foliaged on their outer sides only — a scene of great hideousness which dominated the Worcester Street frontage. The last of the strollers from the Square to the museum concluded that the old Gothic would take another generation to recover from the improvement.