The suburb of New Brighton has widely been regarded as a less favourable place to live despite its close proximity to the beach. Photo / George Heard
Beachfront property the world over is among the most sought after but in Christchurch, a once popular seaside location continues to decline. Why? And what hope does it have for the future? Mike Thorpe explores the rise and fall of New Brighton.
As long as there’s been weather, there’s been a tragic beauty about New Brighton.
A beachside suburb of Christchurch that can be bathed in the most glorious golden sunrise ... and be terrorised by a razor-sharp easterly wind at the same time. Looking east at dawn can bring a simultaneous grin and grimace – sometimes indistinguishable from each other.
On a good day, New Brighton is everything you’d want in a coastal suburb. A long sandy swimmable beach, a broad glistening horizon and a pier that pushes into the Pacific to fully appreciate its undeniable aesthetic. Big blue on big blue.
In its heyday – it had the retail scene to match. The envy of every shopping centre in Canterbury, if not New Zealand. The main street of New Brighton would take on mardi-gras levels of activity in the weekends. For a time, from 1946, New Brighton was the only place in the country where shops could open on Saturdays. They would instead remain closed on a weekday to obey the 40-hour week.
“It was all driven by the Business Association of New Brighton that made this change – that started a completely new pathway for New Brighton which became this intense period of growth,” says developer Robbie Harris, soon to be a central figure in this seaside suburb’s rebirth.
Few know this story better than Harris – a commercial visionary who looks a long way back before adjusting his eyes to the future. In answering what that future might hold, he speaks for 40 minutes without interruption and traverses 150 years of history.
We’ll pick it up somewhere around 1950.
“You have a city [of Christchurch] which probably at that time has around 250,000 people in the surrounding area and you’ve got one small block of shops open on a Saturday and nothing else to do for the whole city,” says Harris.
New Brighton became the star attraction. Come Saturday, all roads led there.
“You have a huge amount of demand and a massive amount of under-supply of shops. And so, this kicked off a development boom,” says Harris.
The boom would ring out for decades.
“People were snapping up properties like crazy. You can go on Canterbury maps and look at what New Brighton looked like in 1940 to 1950s, 60s when it started – to 20 years later and you can just see hundreds of houses bowled down and turned into carparks, turned into big commercial buildings,” says Harris.
“It was just an absolute licence to print money through that period,” he adds.
Fuelled by an outrageously unfair advantage, New Brighton cashed in.
“I remember a lot of the big chain stores when I’d come here on the weekends. Everything was open late night on Saturday night – there were food venues and people all over the place,” says Nigel Gilmore, who still runs the store his father started almost 40 years ago.
Happy Feet is a shoe repairing, key cutting, engraving service that was started by Garry Gilmore in 1987, well after New Brighton’s peak and well before the demise.
“We might be the oldest business around here – I’m not entirely sure,” says Nigel Gilmore.
That’s the scale of the decline here on the main street – a once bustling thoroughfare that has since seen that “licence to print money” revoked.
In the early 1960s New Brighton’s Seaview Rd was targeted as a pedestrian-only mall. It took more than a decade for that idea to become a reality. The mall was opened in 1978 by trail-blazing Christchurch Mayor Hamish Hay. Through no fault of anyone involved, it inadvertently marked the beginning of the end.
In 1980, under the Rob Muldoon-led National Government, Saturday trading was legalised across New Zealand and the upper hand that New Brighton had held for so long began to wave the crowds goodbye. The end of an era.
“It would be pretty difficult for anywhere to ever reach such a high density of popularity again. You have to have something incredibly strong with a huge amount of supply-deficit to demand. It can only happen under false conditions,” says Harris.
By 1989 no day of the week was too sacred for sales as Sunday trading became legalised under David Lange’s Labour Government. What had previously been an anticipated family shopping trip to New Brighton was now an inconvenience that suburban malls could help shoppers avoid.
“The perception has been for quite some time that it was the establishment of indoor malls that killed New Brighton. But really it had nothing to do with it. It was because of the geographics of it all,” says Harris.
Even still, being indoors meant the added bonus of being out of the easterly wind.
“It was a slow decline because New Brighton had momentum. So even though they had opened all the shops, there was still very few places in town that had the variety. It was the biggest mall in Christchurch at the time,” says Harris.
Seaside businesses rallied, trying to regain the stronghold their shopping precinct had enjoyed for so long – but nothing could bring those crowds back.
“It was all in line with trying to keep this false scenario going which was all built on this kind of fake economic situation,” says Harris.
The Saturday shopping era has been likened to the effect of illicit drugs - a massive high followed by a comedown and then a dependency that brings destruction. The shopping monopoly picked New Brighton up for a time, but it ultimately destroyed it.
Worse was to come.
In 2011 the Canterbury earthquakes took a heavy toll on property to the east and New Brighton was no exception. Sand and liquefaction may have similar properties to the naked eye, but only one of them brings joy between your toes.
“That was the big nail in the coffin for a lot of the businesses around here,” says Gilmore.
Now, the empty shops and demolished sites are both a source of hope and hopelessness. To coin a popular political phrase – there are “green shoots” here.
Problem is, many of them are weeds.
Cantabrians will tell you that the area is cursed by the easterly wind. Where else is such seaside property so cheap? It must be the “beasterly” - right?
“No,” says Harris.
“It’s all very logical and evidence-based. There’s no real evidence for something like that to happen globally, like there’s no precedent for it. A semi-occasional cold wind destroying an entire beach town,” says Harris.
“You get places like The Hamptons [Long Island, New York] which has some of the most expensive real estate in the world and has a cold Arctic wind – you start to wonder what that’s all about?” says Harris.
Harris believes New Brighton’s residential struggles are a flow-on from the commercial catastrophe. And there is evidence to support it.
“You have an absolute precedent that is seen over and over and over again of a boom and bust. It fits the description of what’s happened to this area to a tee – and it makes complete sense,” says Harris.
Adding to New Brighton’s real estate quirk are the suburbs either side.
“North Beach and South Beach don’t get treated the same.
“The quality of house that you get – it increases on average in ‘niceness’ the further you get away from the centre, despite it being on the exact same coast with the exact same wind,” says Harris.
He has a point. They do not carry the exact same value.
Instead New Brighton’s property ladder is more of a foot stool – despite having many of the same ingredients as Mount Maunganui, Papamoa, Sumner, St Clair or Mission Bay.
“Why is it not Mission Bay? Well it could’ve been. It should be. It will be. It could be better! Because unlike Mission Bay, we’re in Christchurch, which is so quickly becoming the coolest city in New Zealand,” says Harris.
Robbie Harris is not only a New Brighton history buff – he’s a massive believer in its future. The engineer-turned-developer and his family have invested heavily in the seaside village, and he believes strongly that it will rise again from its dereliction.
“The pathway out of that is looking at what’s worked in the past. Not in the false past, not in the period of time where it was propped up by a false economic situation but what actually happened naturally,” says Harris.
Before the retail boom, New Brighton was a hub for recreation and leisure. Not unusual for a location so close to the beach. The most recent significant investment showed a return to that era, He Puna Taimoana – The New Brighton hot pools.
“It’s not that you can’t invest in New Brighton – it’s not that it’s a crap place. It’s that we’ve been trying to do the wrong stuff there for about 50 years,” says Harris.
The pools have been a success – surprising some, but not Harris.
“A lot of people bought into the stigma of New Brighton that it’s not going to work. It’s a waste of money and these types of things. In the end it eventually got over the line but it shrunk – it went to a smaller size,” says Harris.
It opened in 2020, alongside New Brighton Pier.
“They projected it to make money in year three – it made money in year one,” says Harris.
He plans to anchor development off the crowds that the pools already draw.
“We know people come out of the pools and they just don’t know what to do next. A really big piece of it is hospitality. It’s so important as an anchor,” says Harris.
His first new tenant is just weeks away from opening their doors – Southpaw Brewing.
“I’m a local. I grew up in New Brighton, I live in New Brighton – I love the area,” says Southpaw co-owner Cam Burgess.
“I’ve always looked at New Brighton as being a bit of a domino. It’s going to require a couple of things – and they will beget other things and it’ll all start falling into place,” he adds.
More buildings will be added by Harris and his group – he’s optimistic that the first stage could be completed by the end of the year.
As well as hospitality, Harris is aware that more is needed for locals.
“New Brighton’s actually got 16,000 people who are already living there and they don’t really have a place that they call their centre,” says Harris.
It’s a vision shared by Mike Toohey, owner of New Brighton Cycles and tenant of Harris’s Surfside Mall.
“I’ve got to admit as a local it’d be really nice to see just some core businesses like fruit and veg shop, butchers, local village shopping again,” says Toohey.
It’s not a nice-to-have, like everything Harris speaks to – it’s evidence based.
“One of the negative effects through this big decline is that you have a huge amount of people who live there and one of the worst cases of economic leakage in the country – which means that people who live locally frequently drive past the commercial centre to visit other areas because the quality and variety is better,” says Harris.
There is a hardy bunch of retailers who remain on Seaview Rd. They hope that another boom will echo across the sand dunes – but not like that last one. It seems Harris has read the room. Mostly.
“Don’t fill us up with Glassons and Dotties. Keep it arty, keep it creative and keep it individual,” says Sam from the brilliantly named gift store When Your Sister’s A Witch.
“It should become ... back to its original beach resort – which was what it was for much of its life, a little beach town - not a big retail centre,” says Toohey.
“Hopefully it’s something and they’re not just going to demolish places and just leave it – which is my gut feeling to be honest. It may not be as much as people hope it’s going to be,” says Gilmore.
“Aside from the financial backing of getting stuff done in New Brighton it takes a bit of courage as well. They seem pretty committed to it,” says Burgess.
If nothing else, they can be sure that Harris has done his research.
“This is a once in a lifetime opportunity to be involved in something that really has never occurred anywhere else and has this much underlying potential and this much strong evidence that the potential’s there without us having to create it,” says Harris.
The winds of change are picking up out east.
Pack a jacket just in case.
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