DayOut at St Martha-on-the-Hill

St Martha's is only accessible on foot.


It is on the Pilgrim's Way on a site offering views of Surrey. For a Kiwi it is also of interest because of this:


Not a bad place to be buried.

DayOut in Brighton

Days Out in Lancaster

In the three weeks we have been in Lancaster we have been following the DayOut precept of making the most of the immediate locality. Mostly we have walked, while to visit Morecambe, the Crook of Lune and Windermere we boarded a bus.

Georgian Lancaster is well suited for doing without a car. The city evolved before the car was invented so the central area is ideal for walking. Cycling is also favoured with the canal and river banks and disused rail tracks contributing to the network of paths suitable for both bikes and people on foot.

Tomorrow we cross the road from our flat and catch a train to London.

DayOut in Morecambe

Unsurprisingly a camera crew was unloading its gear as we came up to this rejuvenated Morecambe building but there was no sign of Hercule Poirot. A extra storey has been added but the architects have made a good job of minimising its impact.

Team Dayout had the opportunity this week to test drive a car that’s currently a rarity but which its makers are hoping will become a far more frequent sight on the world’s roads. Alan took the steering wheel of a vehicle powered entirely by electricity, the Mitsubishi iMiEV, while Harry tried the rear seat for comfort.

With limited time for the test, we settled for a journey to the Mount Victoria Lookout, a decent climb over the tortuous route to one of Wellington’s best viewpoints.

The car took to the hills like a mountain runner, steadily round the bends and - most noticeable of all - very, very quietly. It felt like driving an automatic, creeping in reverse when the brake pedal was released, but of course there's no transmission and no gear-changing. The iMiEV’s electric motor has a fixed reduction gear set that feeds the differential, driving the rear wheels. We were told that the motor has enough torque over its speed range to propel the car from zero to a top speed of 130 kph. It sits in the boot, along with lithium-ion batteries which are recycleable, and can be recharged at an ordinary home power socket. The car produces no emissions.

Externally, the test iMiEV looked just like its petrol-powered 660 cc counterpart, except that it was emblazoned with promotional material. It’s being demonstrated throughout New Zealand in conjuction with (naturally enough) Meridian Energy, our largest renewable electricity generator. Meridian itself has an established electric vehicle research programme.

Meridian is not the first State-owned electricity provider to tout the virtues of electric vehicles. Ninety years ago the Public Works Department in Christchurch were espousing the virtue of cheap electricity from Lake Coleridge.

The iMiEV looks like an ideal car for Wellingtonians, who enjoy zipping about the town and suburbs of one of the world's most compact small cities and want to benefit from oil-free driving, thanks to Meridian's wind farms, soon to be commissioned at Makara.

Footnote: Mitsubishi Motors Corp is to double its production capacity target for its iMiEV electric car, according to Reuters news agency. The company announced on 3 April that it will move to an annual 20,000 units in three years and lift output of lithium ion batteries. The automaker had initially planned to make 2,000 plug-in electric cars this business year and raise that to 10,000 units in the year ending March 2012.

Facing the Inevitable

We have finally accepted that, despite the quality of our offering, users are not prepared to pay for the audio guides on DayOut.mobi and DayOut.co.nz . They are now free. All would be users need to do is to subscribe.

We hope that as 3g phone coverage improves and the number of owners grows an increasing number of travellers will find that DayOut.mobi can serve as a guidebook wherever they are in New Zealand and what ever their interest may be.

"Appropriation of the Topographical System."

These days it is trendy to walk and it is something we like to encourage users of DayOut to do. The topic has been given a thorough treatment in a fascinating new book reviewed in this week's Economist; The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism.

Geoff Nicholson the book's author writes of the French word flâner, “a truly wonderful word…it can mean to stroll, but it can also mean the act of simply hanging around.”

In a recent blog photographer Harvey Benge talks of roaming Paris, les flâneur, with friend and fellow photographer Bruce Connew.

Wikipedia tells us: The most notable application of flâneur to street photography probably comes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 essay, On Photography. She describes how, since the development of hand-held cameras in the early 20th century, the camera has become the tool of the flâneur:

The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque.' (pg. 55)

The heading comes from literary theorist, Michel de Certeau, who writes that walking “is a process of appropriation of the topographical system…a special acting-out of the place…it implies relations among differentiated positions”

This might seem somewhat ponderous but I like it.

Terminations

The Terrace is hardly a grand Boulevard. It is not straight and dips up and down along its length but I have long thought that at its grander Parliament end it was a pity the Catholic Diocesan Building was not moved to the West to provide a visual end point as in this view:

With the construction of the new University Halls of Residence Vivian Street now has a satisfying view to the West.

Similarly Dixon Street has its steps and the University Library Building to terminate its westward view;

while Woodward Street has the Warren & Mahoney's post-modern Wellington Club as its visual book-end.

The Changing Face of Christchurch

In Anglican Christchurch the Church of St James in Riccarton was something of a newcomer being built in 1923. It was in the nature of Church infill with the first Riccarton Church (now Upper Riccarton) being St Peters designed by Benjamin Mountfort and built in 1857-58. St James was designed by the Luttrel Brothers who brought skyscrapers to New Zealand.

Now, diagonally across Riccarton Road there is a new religious building; a symbol of the changing nature of New Zealand society. The International Buddhist Centre was designed by Warren & Mahoney with a facade modelled on the Dunhuang caves in north-west China where ancient Buddhist temples were cut into the rock face. Sculptures of Buddha are placed in niches in the Indian sandstone façade.

The Ignomy of William Wakefield and his Memorial.

William Wakefield who negotiated the purchase of Wellington from local Maori was a brother of Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He became the de facto leader of Wellington's settlement until he died in 1848. Before coming to New Zealand he had spent three years in the prison at Lancaster Castle for aiding his brother in the abduction of heiress Ellen Turner.

Lancaster Castle is Still a Prison

On his death his friends raised money for a cast iron memorial and ordered it from England. For over three decades it remained in storage but was then erected on a rise in the Basin Reserve.

But in 1917 when roads were widened it was shifted outside the fence and remained there in lonely solitude and subject to the roar of passing traffic until in 2003 it was given new dignity on the bank inside the Basin Reserve.

Despite his role in the founding of Wellington William Wakefield does not have an entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography.

A Glass Wall & A Glass Box in Petone

Multinational Companies may these days wish to adopt local styles to be 'good citizens' in the places they ply their commerce but in the past they have been unabashed in taking their corporate styles with them. Petone has two examples. One is Unilever's glass box in Jackson Street and the other is the (former) Ford Factory in Seaview which has a glass wall along its north side.

Both buildings make a worthwhile contribution to our architectural landscape.

Factories are important in the history of the Modern Movement. In particular the Peter Behrens A.E. G. High Tension Factory of 1909 "represented the culmination of his efforts to give architectural dignity to a workplace".