Auckland CBD

I can’t live in Auckland without actually going to Auckland so I jumped on the ferry at Devonport and headed over there. 

The first thing that struck me was how tall the buildings are, they are far taller than the buildings in the only city I’ve spent much time in – Plymouth – and they all looked mostly modern and glass fronted. I wandered off down Queens Street which is the main shopping street in Auckland; this is a long straight road with up to six lanes of traffic at some points and has many intersecting roads equally as wide which make up a the reasonably regular grid pattern of central Auckland. This means you can’t walk for two minutes without having to cross a road, which compared to the quaint safety conscious British pedestrian crossings is a far more visual, musical and scary experience. You press the large round crossing button and a slow regular drumming like noise begins, before the traffic had a chance to fully stop – bam – the drummer’s taken a shot of pure caffeine, his pet dog yelps and he strikes the drum at least a hundred times faster, the red stationary man is replaced with an animated green walking man and the procession begins. As you commence walking you see a wall of mostly Anglo Saxon, Eastern Asian and Southern Pacific faces inexorably walking towards you which you must weave you way through, at the same time the traffic on the adjacent road is given the green light to go straight ahead or turn to cross the pedestrian crossing that you are on provided they give way to pedestrians. Here is not safe, you only have priority... And then it's all over. Thankfully though through more judgment than luck I had a 100% road crossing success rate apart from when a bus nearly ran my toes over whilst waiting at a crossing on a corner.

One thing that I like about the shop fronts in Auckland, and the rest of New Zealand that I’ve visited so far, is the permanent shop awnings that they have which extend out to the edge of the road. You rarely ever see this in the UK apart from some retractable awnings outside grocers. Almost every shop front is covered so you can saunter along the main streets without the need of a rain coat when it rains, as it does a lot here. They can seem somewhat disproportioned with the massively wide roads and, as in Auckland, the twenty or thirty storey high glass fronted buildings on top of them. But I like it and think it’s a shame this kind of thing doesn’t happen more in the UK.

The Sky Tower

The Sky tower in Auckland was somewhat of a letdown to me, it’s the tallest tower in the southern hemisphere at 328 metres and is well decorated at the top but the bottom three quarters are made ostensibly from concrete sewer or drain pipe sections like you see on construction sites. I can only assume that during maintenance or repair of the city’s sewer system they had a few too many sections of concrete pipe remaining and in lieu of any other options the foreman decided to pile them vertically on top of one another to save space, and the tower was born. Maybe I’ll change my view on this but so far the likes of the Spinnaker Tower in Portsmouth and the under construction London Bridge Shard in London are far more attractive.

 

After the crowds and the crossings and cars driving on pavements (a whole post will be dedicated to driving soon) I was rather glad to get back to the peace of Belmont. Cities definitely aren't my cup of tea so hopefully the rest of New Zealand will be.