The Star. FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1923. A MORIBUND ASSOCIATION.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17038, 11 May 1923, Page 8

The Star. FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1923. A MORIBUND ASSOCIATION.

An effort is being- made to put new life into the Beautifying Association which, on the admission of its own members, is “ more or less moribund.” Unfortunately, very little of the “ new life ” which it is hoped to put into the Association appears to have been present at the annual meeting’, if one is to judge from the election of officers. The Association has a backing of influential citizens, but they lack the executive energy and enthusiasm necessary for the projecting and carrying obt of a useful programme. They are ladies and gentlemen who, no doubt, have a very deep reverence for the work of the pioneers in planning the beautiful outline of the city and endowing it with parks and open spaces, but the Association to-day stands self-condemned by one item alone in its balance-sheet, namely, the carefully hoarded trust fund of £450, which lay for many years in the bank, and is now safely wrapped up in a war bond napkin.

The Association’s actual work in the past five or six years has been almost negligible, and it has not been wideawake enough to resist, a certain policy of drift in regard to city beautifying, notably the very weak action of the City Council in handing over, the improvement of the Avon to the Drainage Board, of all bodies. However, it is something to know that the Association realises its past shortcomings, and is prepared to go forward more actively than in the past, and the co-operation of the River Improvement Committee is a good augury. The Association ought to plan out a definite programme, and see that it is carried l out. One speaker at the annual meeting suggested a movement to ensure the carrying of all service wires under ground, and in this direction the Association might do valuable work, especially at a time when the lighting of Hag-ley Park threatens to destroy much of the beauty of tbis fine reserve by the inevitable forest of poles and wires. 'As a matter of fact the Association will probably find. its hands quite full in resisting the outrages that are proposed from time to time on the public sense of good taste. During its period of somnolence many permanent disfigurements bave been quietly forced on the city. The most -objectionable of these, perhaps, are the slot telephone cabinets and carriers’ cabinets that have been allowed to trespass on the streets. A notable instance is to be found at the Clock Tower, where the. disfiguring presence of an unsightly telephone cabinet is accentuated by a minature kind of electric substation and a carriers’ telephone—three excrescences that destroy the beauty' of the tower altogether. Then there are the electric light poles on the Victoria Square grass plo-t, the half-underground lavatory projecting into the road at Cashel Street, the extended tramway shelter and “ safety zone ” in Catherdal Square, the electrical sub-stations in Victoria Street, Bealey Avenue and elsewhere, and the festoons of electrical wires, which make Christchurch pay dearly, in an {esthetic sense, for its cheap electricity. The Association has never raised a protest against these disfigurements, nor attempted an educative campaign to prevent the perpetration of similar blunders in the future. It is to be hoped, therefore, that in renewing- its activities in the city the Association will not expend all its energy or enthusiasm on tasks that might very well be carried out by the city gardener, but will take a new and broad outlook on the wider problems of city beautifying.