Philippa Stevenson: 'Blot' on the Taupiri landscape

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Taupiri. Many of us just take the sharp State Highway 1 bend from the north, cross the bridge, and slow for the few houses before hitting the gas again.

But some passersby are stopped in their tracks by the quaint wooden church with its cute bell tower. Tourists pose for photographs in the tranquil setting of historic building and manicured grounds.

The idyll was shattered for some locals in January when what they regard as a blot on their beloved landscape was plonked in the church grounds.

The offensive item was a two-room prefab that - to them - owed everything to tackiness and pragmatism and nothing to architecture and history.

Taupiri might be celebrating the 100th anniversary of Christ Church next year but now the Historic Places Trust category two building is the subject of an unholy row.

The churchgoers wanted a Sunday School, a couple of toilets and somewhere to hold occasional vestry meetings.

Outraged townspeople say they might not attend the church but they've cared for it over the years, it's an attractive town feature and they would like to have been consulted about changes.

It is a minor dispute in a small village of about 850 souls but, like so many other quarrels in New Zealand at the moment, it comes partly fuelled by racial tension.

Christ Church is part of the Anglican Church's Maori wing and is attended by Maori from Huntly and Ngaruawahia. Few Taupiri people - possibly only one family - attend services there.

Church neighbour Elva Gouk, deputy chairwoman of the Taupiri Community Board, has led objections to the relocated building. She has support in the community and on the board, but also has detractors among both groups.

A 10-year Taupiri resident, Gouk says she has been a good neighbour to the church, and work on her own charming garden has improved the church's backdrop.

She, other neighbours and residents I spoke to would have appreciated church leaders informing and consulting them and the community board on their plans.

They are also angry that the Waikato District Council, to whom a resource use application was made for the building, did not inform them.

"We would like never to have had it [the prefab] there, but if there had to be something, it should be in keeping with the church," Gouk said.

She feels, too, there has been a double standard. A well-known part of the church's history is that in 1888 a young settler girl, Edith White, died in Taupiri but because of flooding, was not buried in the cemetery.

Instead, she was interred in a corner of the church grounds.

The body was to be shifted, but the task proved too difficult and a compromise was reached. The body could remain in the unconsecrated ground but no headstone could be erected.

Gouk would have liked to ensure the building was not placed over the grave. More care would have been taken, she believes, if it had been a Maori burial site.

Another local, who didn't want to be named, said that when he relocated a building in the town he had to consult all his neighbours.

Another resident would have preferred "a replica of the church".

The church folk and the council went by the rulebook.

The church is in a residential zone under the district plan, which allows resited buildings to be approved by the council but not by adjacent property-owners - or whole communities.

Neither was the Historical Places Trust consulted - something area co-ordinator Gail Henry would have expected from the council.

It was nice to know, however, that the community was concerned about its heritage building, she said.

Christ Church's Reverend Wiremu Graham, and another church minister, Reverend Dawn Rawiri, are sorry for upsetting residents with the only building they could afford.

"It just didn't enter our heads to contact people in Taupiri," Reverend Rawiri told me. "We showed the Anglican Diocese in Hamilton and went to the council. It's a faux pas."

Once the building is painted and a new fence completed, she is confident it will enhance the village.

The church, she says, is not just for Maori.

"We welcome everyone. They should come along. We don't want to quarrel."

A friendly get-together seems a good step. Then the venerable church - and everyone else - could celebrate a shared history with goodwill.