LEADING NOWHERE

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 90, 13 October 1923, Page 13

LEADING NOWHERE

THE ALLEYS OF TE ARO FLAT

CONFUSION WORSE CON

FOUNDED

A PROBLEM BEFORE THE CITY.

(By "H.")

Wellington is now paying through the third and fourth generations, and ■will continue to^pay, air ever-increasing account if one way is taken, a diminishing account if another way is followed, for the unfortunate blunder made eighty years ago in laying out the city in acre lots, sections r far-too large to make for economic town building and town land utilisation; but Wellington was founded' as few towns have been founded, it was very largely a commercial proposition, though those who were the shareholders in the New .Zealand Land Companywere undoubtedly also philanthropists. There were so'many acres of-town land available, there! was then ft>t even the beginning of a. town, and no really great promise, and the acre lot was chosen as •being most attractive to the subscriber. A Wellington business man to-day would feel seriously disinclined to buy tfie title deeds of-a quarter-acre of land on the site of a proposed new city in Patagonia; he might readily enough agree to the purchase of a Ml town acre with attached to if outside the proposed city boundaries a rural section, of one hundred acres, as was the condition -when Wellington town acres were dffered in England in" the early.'forties. : •'■ Other New Zealand towns', happily for themselves, generally avoided the large section blunder into which Wellington had fallen as a result'of the'manner of its foundation. Auckland, for instance, was largely laid out.in quarter-acre sections. Christchurch drew up its plan Inter on still- truer- economic ■principles: l)unedin followed suit. ' . . ,

"A MAGNIFICENT, SITE. COM-

PLETKLY DESTROYED."

Strangely enough' though the earliest officially recognised Wellington city plan bears the signature of Felton Matnew, New Zealand's first Surveyor-General, it was not his plan, and was one with which he disagreed most" heartily, a plan which he scathingly. denounced as being thoroughly unsound in that" it threatened to-rum Vsplendid city' site. Reporting to Governor Hobson in ■ October. 1841, Felton Mat-hew, wrote :—,

, "The other considerable portion of the .t<(/n is jgid out; or supposed to be laid out, on -iand of this description, where it would be difficult to find a sufficient extent of even tolerably level ground on-, which-to erect a house. On the whole, the cite of the town is certainly admirably adapted to "the purpose, and jvouTd. aftord ample space for on.c of considerable extent,and for accommodation cf. ;i. very numerous population had the character of the ground and the local fldyantAgßs been properly estimated and judiciously taken advantage of. I consider it a magnificent site completely destroyed, and it appears •to have been sacrificed to the absurdity of laying put a plan on a sheet of paper and restricting the size of allotments to an acre, an extent which is far t°o large for the purpose' required, and is calculated, only to promote the greedy epirit of speculation .in town' allotments with which most. hew colonies ane unfortunately .rife. Had the plan for disposing of land in this town been such as to admit ot allotments varying in extent from an eighth of nn acre upwards, and had the two portions of fiat land whi«h 1 have alluded to been judiciously laid out they would have been amply sufficient to accommodate a, very large number of inhabitants. The population \vp\rtd have been more condensed inatsad of being scattered along a. beach of two miles: in extent, and an allotment of smaller size would have been far more valuable to the proprietors (excepting- a favoured situation) than one of an acre according to the present arrangement.V By that arrangement a. small'number of the pro-p.-ietora have large- allotments of great': value, v.hile many of them, Bach is the. character of the. land, can never be available for any purpose whatsoever. "Another more serious disadvantage attendant on this system is. that the iratunl features of the ground being neglected the streets, are carried across ra-' vines And over rugged and impracticable ground which cannot bo made passable but at enormous expense." THE ORIGINAL. TE ARO PLAN. The fact was that the plan had been previously drawn up by Captain Mem Smith, of the Royal Artillery, SurveyorGeneral to the Land Company, and had been virtually accepted and acted upon when Felton Mathew reported-upon it; it was placed before him, and he had no option, but to express his opinions to the Governor and to place hie signature reiuctantlj upon the document. The writer had ihp privilege of examining a copy of this early plan; and, on paper, it is in truth a very handsome plan, but contour 'lines are not shown, and paper acres climb in ugly fashion when applied to actual Wellington conditions; but 'fe Aro flat has no broken hills and" deep ravines, and it was to that section of the city that attention was particularly directed. The original lay-out va6 good, and it was bad; it was good Jjcause it was regular and sightly, but. the regularity, was not carried far enough; it was bad, having regard to the^ tuture, in that the scale was seriously faulty, the . town lota were four times too large. Though Captain Meih Smith plainly recognised the value of a regular lay-out of the flat lands, yet he divided his plan j into two styles; west of Taranaki street the. town acre 3 ran roughly north and south in their longest dimensions, east of that street. ihey ran east and west, the blocks varying in size from,eight to sixteen acres, thovgh some were larger and others smaller,, but no block was more than two sections (longest dimensions) deep. :It is probable that the rise up to Mount Cook to the south and the low-lying Basin- Reserve and the gully down which a, creek ran from the Basin to the sea were the reasons-why one regular lay-out was not carried over the full fiat. :■■.; .-. - .... ■ ■ ■ • . "ONE CROSS STREET. As a result of the strange division into two block arrangementß, it followed that, at only, one point could a street be driven clear' across the flat from Willis street to Cambridge terrace, Vivian street. Other streets, Ghuzneo and Abel Smith streets, to the west of Taranaki street, and Buckle street,- to the east, would, had they, been- carried onwards o.ver Taranaki-street, have cut through the line of sections ahead, thus breaking up, the acre plan and throwing the whole scheme of attractive land marketing out of gear. In one point only did the east and west ■ and north and south section lines coincide at Taranaki street, and 50 Vivian street is the one cross city thoroughfare in the flat to-day. Ghuzne.e and Abel Smith streets run to Taranaki street, and run no further.

•■ Buckle street does, run on acroes Tarariaki street to-day, but it did not do so on the original plan, and the Buckle street extension, Arthur street, is a

pleasant exception among recent streets m that it has disregarded the mere cutting through of .the four town acres in its way and leads again to Tonk's grove, at present a blind alley, but in all probability destined to become oue length of a great axis- thoroughfare. - •". .. Strange as it may appear to citizens of to-day Captain SmiUi did not intend that Cuba street should run on past Vivian street, but ehould lead to a great block of eighteen acres bounded, by Willis, Abel Smith, Vivian, and Taranaki streets, but happily here the section lines made possible the easy extension of Cuba street. To the east of Taranaki street no streets running to Cambridge terrace were provided for at all. Tory street, running north and south, was considered sufficient to serve the sixtyacre block bounded by Courtenay .place, Taranaki street, Cambridge terrace, and Buckle street, and amply it would have served- had Wellington never grown to the status of a city, thoroughly well would Tory street have served liad town acres been quarter-acres. The present cross streets, Frederick, Haining, JeEsie, College, and Lome streets, were put'through ih later years.

THE DRIVING OF BLIND ALLEYS.

_As ■ the town grew it became impossible to feed the great blocks from the streets as originally provided for, and landowners, probably rather with the intention of dividing up. their holdings for sale than with the intention of giving better service to those areas, drove through their own roads. The land was theirs and they pleased themselves, and if by pleasing themselves they could also make it more difficult for the landowner next to them to sell his property the more assured was the sale of their acre or acres, and thus the city map to-day reveals that certain of . these lanes and alleyways, narrow streets and blind streets, do not hug closely the section boundaries, but take a line a foot or two inside, that the owner of the land adjoining might not have the privilege of using'that alleyway unless and until he chose to pay the price the enterprising alley-builder placed upon, the narrow strip of land he had thoughtfully left between'his land and his neighbour's. - None of the twisting, hopelessly uneconomic alleys and blind streets which appear upon the city.map to-day were in the mind of tljose who drew up the finstcity plan, and they first began to appear, it would seem, 1 about the 'eighties, driven through blocks, from unexpected points, a minor number of them running through from .planned street, to planned street, others stopping blindly, still others wandering round a corner or two, ending blind again. The individual owner pleased himself, sometimes. making for an improvement, of the city, but spoiling that good work by skimping his road widths—Marion street being an outstanding exception,"■'a • worthy privately planned street indeed-^more often making more impossible a plan .v>.in the first place was unsound and disastrously uneconomical.

THE PROSPECTS?

Wellington iriay continue to foot the heavy bill ol wasted city lands, for'land that cannot be efficiently utilised is land that is largely wasted, the heavy : bill of unordered building and resulting serious business and traffic congestion' at vital points, an account that, will mount up higher as each year the city grows, or "Wellington may tackle the problem of straightening out the tangle while yet there is a possibility of success. In the first case there is the future! of Wellington as a planned: city to consider, in the second the expenditure of a great sum of money certainly, -but also the recouping of a great amount of that expenditure, perhaps the whole, .perhaps a balance on the right side may even bo possible, by the increased value of central city properties. • To-day tho task is much more difficult than it was five years agoj in five years' time the problem will have grown vaster still. ...