FORMING RECREATION GROUNDS

Dominion, Volume 32, Issue 260, 1 August 1939, Page 8

FORMING RECREATION GROUNDS

Fine Area At No Cost For Defence Department

For years past the Wellington City Corporation has been reclaiming with rubbish and spoil the great hole made in tlie beach on the Defence Department’s reserve at Seatoun through years of shingle excavation. The benefit of this operation is now beginning to show. When the place was visited yesterday afternoon by the members of the reserves committee of the city council, the city engineer, Mr. K. E. Luke, pointed out that part of the area of old shingle quarry to the south had now been filled to the level of the ground, given a layer of topsoil, and sown with grass seed. This area is about a inhere and a half in extent. There Is less than two years’ work left at this Bp after which the Defence Department will have no less than 111 acres of flat, well-grassed land to lie used as a drill ground or for sportb. This ground will cost them nothing. Only a few years ago it was a rough •foreshore of sand and shingle, half covered by seaweed in heavy weather. The Hataitaj recreation ground cost £50,000, which provides a striking illustration of the difference in the cost of forming recreation grounds in Wellington. The Hataitai ground was made by unemployed labour, and was a work that lasted right through the depression, and the other was transformed by the application of the modern system of rubbish disposal. It. is likely that several other grounds will be formed in Wellington by similar methods.