Brian Rudman: Bunfight at the not okay corral

COMMENT


Tomorrow evening there's a bunfight at the Britomart Transport Centre to open the "new retail centre" which, we are told, will provide "fast, convenient shopping".

Like the fast and convenient rail service Britomart is not providing, this is another promise which offers more than it delivers.

The shopping will be fast and convenient only if you're downtown on foot and looking for takeaway crepes, a new cellphone, a $4 cup of coffee, foreign exchange, rental cars, dry cleaning, sushi, convenience foods and flowers. And train tickets.

But of a service really useful in a transport centre, an Auckland information booth, there is no sight - despite pledges as recently as August to the contrary. The closest is a little window in the ticket office offering local bus and train information.

In late July during the grand opening of Britomart, I fulminated about the lack of plans for this service. Tourism Auckland chief executive Graeme Osborne declared himself "extremely disappointed" and said his organisation had been shut out because train operator Tranz Scenic wanted a monopoly on travel services in the building.

Mr Osborne backed his case by saying Tourism Auckland's Queen Elizabeth Square visitor centre had been "by far, historically, our most successful centre" until its closure due to the redevelopment of the adjacent building.

The resulting furore led to chief station master Martin Gummer backing down and offering Tourism Auckland space within the station. By then, I now discover, Graeme Osborne had had second thoughts and decided to stay in his new headquarters in the Sky City gambling palace.

"They offered us a corner space which was too small," says Mr Osborne. "To be honest I must say we're not devastated. It's early days for the Britomart and the market is still pretty much 100 per cent domestic."

He said there were plans for another significant CBD visitors centre within the next three years "but we're not going to leap into the wrong one".

Well tell that to tourists downtown looking for someone to point them towards the museum, or the Viaduct basin, or a toilet. Just four months ago Mr Osborne said himself how popular the previous downtown advice bureau was. When it closed, a procession of tourists turned the Britomart display centre into a de facto tourist bureau. Staff who were employed to explain the finer points of the train station project to Aucklanders rapidly became expert tourist ambassadors as well. They're no longer there, but the need remains.

Mind you, Queen Elizabeth Square has become so bleak and uninviting, it's hard to imagine anyone wanting to loiter there.

How could the people responsible for the exciting internal spaces of the Britomart make such a botch of the outside?

Take the grey paved wasteland stretching the length of the square on the old post office side. Obviously designed by a committee that's never had to stand in the rain or the hot sun waiting for a bus. Sure, there are a few glass-topped shelters to slowly broil under. But where are the shade trees to provide relief from rain or burning heat?

Why not a grove of my favourite fast-growing street tree, known variously as melia, Indian bead tree or Persian lilac. It lines the streets around my way, this time of the year, its mauve blossoms perfuming the whole neighbourhood.

Instead, a lone remaining pohutukawa excepted, the only greenery in the whole square is a chessboard arrangement of kauri saplings, planted unnaturally close to each other in a bed of alien grey river stones. In recent weeks they've sprouted new shoots in a defiant gesture of the life force over imprisonment.

But having seen them placed in their growing pit, each one linked by metal chain, to the next, before the soil and rocks were poured over their rootballs, I can feel only guilt at their plight as I scurry by.

On that side, instead of bleak grey concrete squares, there's a sea of bleak brown bricks instead.

The talking point here is something called a "fire boulder", two basalt blocks, one on top of the other, about 2.5 metres high, with a little metal trapdoor at the top. Kitsch koru symbols are carved into the side. It's supposed to erupt a metre-high jet of fire every two or three minutes and dribble water down its sides, a symbol of Auckland's geological origins.

Apparently it worked for a few days before drifting rubbish clogged its workings. It's been dormant ever since, but I've been reassured it'll be up and running by tomorrow lunchtime.

Perhaps the best we can hope for is it gets off to a rather larger than planned eruption,