Disease, Demolition and Developers

Typhoid grips a suburb, a prescient planner envisages the pedestrianised harbour we know today, and the Harbour Board's reclamations set the foundations for our commercial heart; fascinating nuggets revealed by some little-known maps from over a century ago.

Proposed Extension of the City of Wellington (1877)

In 1877 Danish architect Conrad Seidelin – working under the pseudonym of 'Mr Darnoc' – drew up plans to transform Wellington’s waterfront. His imagination was fueled by a big reclamation a year earlier, which created 190,000m2 around the northern end of Featherston Street – almost a third of all Wellington’s man-made land.

Seidelin’s credentials had been established by his masterplanning the redesign of Copenhagen, where his scheme to demolish the city's walls won Denmark's Medal of Merit two decades earlier. Wellington was an ambitious city, and the Danish architect didn’t hold back, with designs straight out of the Renaissance urban planning playbook. Heavy on symmetry (a challenge given our terrain), the city’s centrepiece was to be a curved waterfront basin where Te Papa is located today, with tree-lined avenues drawing people to the waterfront.

The plan was a rejection of the closely packed laneways and squalor that characterized Te Aro. Seidelin's map left the ghostly outline of the recently completed Queens Wharf in his layout as a reminder that his vision was of a modern city, rather than a colonial outpost; public facilities and major businesses would have to make way. Ornamental gardens at Herd Street would have required the demolition of the recently opened Te Aro Baths, and warehouses around the northern end of Taranaki Street were to be replaced by a large piazza – a concept that has never really worked in New Zealand.

Wellington's city councillors sensibly considered the design impractical and expensive: curved docks and enormous land reclamation were luxuries the capital could ill-afford. The proposal was rejected, and expansion into the harbour continued piecemeal for the next 50 years – a situation not too dissimilar to Copenhagen's remodeling, where many of the ramparts and lakes Seidelin wanted removed were retained and are popular parts of the Danish capital today.

Seidelin’s vision is intriguing because it merges radical urban form with the streets we know today. The map was drawn before the railway arrived in the city, but the Government Building (opened in the previous year) is clearly identifiable the end of Lambton Quay. 

The idea of an accessible waterfront would have seemed fantastical in the latter part of the 19th Century – yet 150 years on visiting cafes at the water’s edge as envisaged is central to the Wellington experience.

Typhoid Area (1892)

Wellington’s emergence as a shipping hub facilitated the spread of diseases, with SS England bringing smallpox to the city in 1872. Surges in measles occurred every five years, and Pertussis (whooping cough) killed 24 people in 1891 alone. Typhoid first appeared in New Zealand as an epidemic disease in 1860, and the period between 1886 and 1891 became known as the ‘typhoid years’ with 548 Wellingtonians dying from bacterial infections (including cholera). 

Meanwhile the city grew from around 15,000 in 1875 to 49,344 in 1901. Densely packed Te Aro was particularly vulnerable, with infrastructure hopelessly unable to keep up. It was hardly surprising that many Wellington families fled to settlements like Karori, including the Beauchamps with their young daughter Kathleen (writer Katherine Mansfield), following the death of their baby Gwen from cholera in 1891.

William Chapple, a 28-year-old doctor fresh from his previous practice in Motueka, set about mapping the deaths in the tradition of English physician John Snow, who Chapple would have learned about as a student at King’s College London. Snow (one of the fathers of modern epidemiology) had pinpointed the source of a major cholera outbreak in London four decades previously by plotting the location of cases, and traced them eventually to a contaminated water pump at Broad Street.

Chapple quickly identified Holland Street as the centre of the Wellington outbreak, where he found blocked pipes and lavatories causing excrement to flow under the cottages’ floorboards, sewers venting directly into the houses, and residents without plumbed lavatories emptying their ‘night soil’ onto the street. Unsurprisingly an inspection of the hospital’s admission records showed typhoid cases soaring after heavy rainfall, when excrement sluiced into the harbour in rivulets around and under people’s homes.

None of this squalor is obvious in Chapple’s deceptively simple map. The colour of the dots reflect cholera’s ‘blue death’ nickname, with the victim’s skin turning bluish-grey from loss of fluids, their distribution reflecting the slums that lined Te Aro’s laneways.

Chapple recommended ‘a complete system of sewerage on modern principles’ to empty the city’s waste into Cook Strait, rather than Lambton Harbour, via a sewer tunnel under Mount Victoria. The cost was controversial (£165,000 – $35m today), but the incidence of sewage-related diseases treated at Wellington Hospital fell dramatically once the infrastructure was completed in 1899.

Chapple later became a prominent eugenics advocate (‘habitual drunkards and nocturnal house-breakers’ were included on his list of undesirables). He holds the unusual distinction of being elected to parliament in both New Zealand and the UK, and retained his New Zealand medical registration throughout, returning to work at Wellington Hospital as the Resident Casualty Officer in the 1930s – perhaps he regaled the junior doctors with accounts of the city as he recalled it four decades.

Plan of 12 Building Sections on the Te Aro Reclamation (1906)

Established in 1880, Wellington Harbour Board was tasked with operating and expanding the city’s port. Starting work three years after Seidelin’s master plan was rejected, the Harbour Board embarked on a programme of reclamations driven by Chief Engineer William Ferguson that laid the foundation for the inner city waterfront of today.

Ferguson aligned the new wharves so that the prevailing winds would help ships manoeuvre, and reduce the requirement for tugs to help vessels berth; he also drove investment in hydraulic cranes. The port was recognised as one of the best equipped in the Southern Hemisphere. Ferguson created a partnership with the government and City Council to deliver a series of new wharves and land reclamations – including the Taranaki Street Wharf development, completed in 1905.

The reclaimed land was ‘a magnificent block’, according to auctioneers George Thomas & Co. ahead of its sale in February 1906 – and for once the real estate hyperbole was justified. A flurry of investment had transformed the surrounding area since the turn of the century, with a new fire station (reassuring for commercial building owners) on Lower Cuba Street, opposite the City Council’s impressive new Town Hall which opened on December 7th 1904. Concert-goers arrived on the electric trams that had commenced service in the preceding months, and in the summer rowers in the Star Boating Club’s boathouse enjoyed music from a new bandstand on the Cuba Street side of Jervois Quay.

It was all remarkably modern. The map reassured buyers that the land on offer was anything but the Te Aro of the typhoid years; it even shows the Polhill Gully Watercourse (described by the Evening Post as ‘exceedingly offensive’ a decade earlier) now buried in a long culvert under the city’s streets. The map omitted the city’s waste incinerator at Chaffers Park; it was expanded shortly after the Taranaki Street reclamation was auctioned off – caveat emptor.

The sale was well attended and two buyers bought all but one of the allotments; the State Coal Department purchased the land south of Cable Street (a new road named after the Harbour Board’s outgoing Chairman William Cable). The modernist John Chambers Building was completed in 1918, and the smaller Inglis Brothers bicycle workshop occupied the Taranaki Street end of the block – the Wakefield Market food stalls was the building's final incarnation prior to its demolition in 2007.

The land to the north was purchased by timber merchants C & A Odlin’s. The company completed its eponymous building within 19 months of acquiring the site, with Shed 22 built as a wool store by the Harbour Board when Odlin’s moved its timber yard to Petone in the 1920s. In the mid-1990s there were plans to raze the empty buildings and replace them with a reviled casino-hotel, but resource consent was withheld when the extent of the public opposition became clear.

Aside from those replaced by the One Market Lane development, the buildings that sprang up from the 1906 auction remain in situ, historic waterfront buildings that are fully renovated, earthquake strengthened, and home to blue-chip businesses like the Stock Exchange and architects Warren and Mahoney. A magnificent block – just as the auctioneer promised 115 years ago.

First published in Capital (Issue 81).

Concrete dreams

The rise of private car ownership, the baby-boom and post-war reconstruction were catalysts for drastic urban planning interventions around the world, a fashion that inevitably reached New Zealand. Metropolitan Wellington’s population increased by 63% in the space of two decades from 1945 – and was projected to reach 398,000 in 1981 (wildly inaccurate – this did not happen until 2014).

This growth, largely concentrated in the Hutt Valley and Porirua, was a headache for planners, but it also gave the civic leadership confidence to invest. It stimulated a decade of radical proposals for the capital, and came close to destroying much of what Wellingtonians now love about the city.

Comprehensive Transport Plan for Wellington (1963 / 1966)

By the late 1950s rapidly increasing traffic volumes on the Hutt Road (comparable to Adelaide Road today) caused a fear of gridlock, and work on the first part of the Urban Motorway from Ngauranga to Aotea Quay started in 1959.

There was bitter debate about the next phase of the road, between a ‘foothills motorway’ route through Thorndon, and one along the waterfront – the latter preferred by the City Engineer and the Ministry of Works. In 1960 American transport consultant De Leuw, Cather & Company was commissioned by the Wellington Regional Planning Authority (a predecessor of the Regional Council) to resolve the matter and create Wellington’s first Transportation Master Plan.

Despite its being the cheaper option (at £13,000,000 cost – close to $570 million today) the initial report in 1963 made the waterfront route look as unpalatable as possible. Projected traffic volumes would require ‘a double-decked structure approximately 40 feet [four storeys] in height with three lanes in each direction’. This would have run from Bunny Street to Cable Street, with offramps required at Kings Wharf, Post Office Square and Mercer Street. The report warned of conflict between the motorway and what was still a working inner harbour, and the impact on the amenity of the waterfront, pointing out how quickly San Francisco’s officials had come to regret building their new freeway above the Embarcadero.

The foothills route was duly recommended, even though it was projected to cost almost 50% more and need streets of houses demolished, with the Mount Victoria tunnel to be duplicated during the first phase of works. The time required to dig the Terrace Tunnel meant Te Aro would need a one-way system to speed up traffic (half a century later the Council has voted to slow traffic down), with southbound vehicles routed up Cuba Street.

Public transport was also considered, with a recommendation that once the motorway was completed the railway should be extended in a 3km subway to the end of Courtenay Place – with underground stations at Parliament, Lambton (located under Boulcott Street), Cuba Street and Courtenay Place – all for £11,000,000 ($480 million in 2020).

As proposed the complete the motorway would have buried half the Basin Reserve under motorway offramps, a deep trench cut across the top of Te Aro and a ‘full-diamond interchange’ at Taranaki Street – designs familiar to Wellingtonians who successfully defeated the Tunnel Link proposals a quarter of a century later.

The focus on roads alarmed Wellington’s retailers. They feared that greater mobility would send shoppers to more convenient destinations outside the city, and commissioned a rival proposal from architects Gabites and Beard. ‘Precinct Planning for Wellington’ (released in 1965) had some bold predictions, with ‘public transport vehicles running on air cushions rather than rails’ and ‘combined air and ground vehicles in general use’ by the year 2000. But the pedestrianisation of large parts of the CBD, rather than a focus on cars, proved popular with Wellingtonians, and this influenced the final version of the Comprehensive Transport Plan in 1966, including retaining the Basin Reserve.

Draft Town Plan (1965)

With the transport masterplan complete the City Council was free to focus on transforming the CBD. In 1957 Robert (‘Terry’) Kennedy arrived at University of Auckland to take the first Chair of Town Planning. He was retained as a consultant by Wellington City Council from 1965-75, and the 1965 Draft Town Plan clearly reflected his previous job remodelling Britain’s blitzed cities.

Some ideas were developed from the De Leuw report and ‘Precinct Planning’, including Cuba Mall, and the Farish Street Extension which pushed Victoria Street through to the top of Te Aro – to feed a future Western Suburbs motorway running through a tunnel from the top of Aro Street to Karori.

The plan was also critical of central Wellington’s small commercial plots and streets laid out for the era of deliveries by horse-drawn vehicles, now resulting in increasing conflict between vehicles and pedestrians. European cities were able to ‘take advantage of’ extensive bomb damage to unleash ambitious redevelopments – and Wellington was to follow suit with the ‘Willis Street redevelopment area’, a three tier ‘superblock’ similar to London’s Barbican, to tackle ‘the bottleneck between Stewart Dawson’s corner and the sea’.

The development would have been enormous, stretching between the top of Plimmer Steps and the waterfront. The existing street layout was to be maintained but built over, with garaging and warehouses at ground level, and car parking above them, accessed via ramps from Jervois Quay and a Willis Street flyover connecting Victoria and Boulcott streets. Above that to be a pedestrian deck, with shops, offices and hotels.

The sheer chutzpah of the Town Planning Committee’s report was admirable: the Willis Street superblock was ‘economically feasible’ and would ‘rehabilitate the centre of Wellington’ in combination with the proposed Civic Centre and new Cuba Mall. The City Engineer pointed out to doubters ‘this sort of integrated development is already taking place in larger cities overseas’.

The project stumbled at the first hurdle: the population growth projection was criticised as overly optimistic (a failing among Council officials), and the indicative £50,000,000 cost ($2.1bn in 2020) was seen as wildly unaffordable. Councillor Turk called the proposal ‘a Utopian flight of fantasy’ – and by the mid-1970s Kennedy’s departure from WCC’s payroll and the city’s stagnation meant the idea mercifully faded into the long list of municipal what ifs.

Report and Development Plan for the Wellington City Council Civic Centre (1974)

The idea of a municipal precinct dates back to the 1942 Wairarapa Earthquake, which led to the demolition of the old city library building and technical college buildings on Wakefield Street – now the site of the Council’s closed Civic Administration Building and empty Municipal Office Building (or MOB). Work started on MOB in 1946, and the popular lawn in front of the building was referred to as the Civic Centre.

The Council had gradually acquired land at the harbour end of Cuba Street from the 1960s, and the section of Mercer Street between the Town Hall and Central Library was often closed for civic festivities, so it was a small leap of imagination to pedestrianize the space. Terry Kennedy and Ken Clarke (the council’s City Planner) embarked on a scheme to banish vehicles and create a ‘true and pleasant centre of the City of Wellington’.

The masterplan that emerged had all the hallmarks of European post-war design. The demolition of the seismically prone Town Hall would clear the way for a decidedly Soviet looking 10,000m² office building; a conference facility was to be built on the corner of Harris Street and Jervois Quay; and pedestrian subways would give access to the waterfront and the new shopping arcade that was to be built over Mercer Street through to Willis Street. Kennedy realised changes in opinion and finances would alter the plan, but he suggested a 15 year development programme – the new library and conference centre were to have been completed by 1986.

Instead Mayor Michael Fowler championed the construction of the new concert hall: it was commissioned in 1975, but the challenging ground conditions delayed work. The building was opened in 1983, by which time campaigns to promote the heritage and acoustic value of the old Town Hall had made its removal untenantable, leaving the two buildings uncomfortably close to each other. The waterfront had been transformed from potential motorway route to an increasingly popular open public space – and a rethink for the precinct was required.

While the development Kennedy proposed would have been built at the height of Brutalism in New Zealand, some of the core ideas from the 1974 masterplan shaped today’s Civic Square, including turning the 1937 library building into a ‘City Gallery’. This stimulated the council in 1980 to create exhibition space at 65 Victoria Street, before demolishing the building and using the site for the new Central Library (another Kennedy recommendation). Interconnected elevated walkways linked the library and council buildings – until they were deemed seismic risks earlier this decade – and the space enjoys good sunlight.

Kennedy died in 1997, with his superblock vision for Wellington’s civic precinct largely realised, and especially the underground parking and wide pedestrian expanses. With the Civic Administration Building likely to be demolished, perhaps the lawn in front of the municipal offices which coined the precinct’s name could be restored – bringing the Civic Centre concept full-circle?

First published in the Summer 2021 issue of Capital.

Cutting shapes: the three infrastructure projects that made modern Wellington

“God made New Zealand,” said Sir John-Pearce Luke (Mayor of Wellington from 1913-1921). “But engineers made Wellington”.

Wellington's steep terrain, regular earthquakes and ferocious weather have been constant challenges, and Sir John knew good infrastructure was critical to making our city a success. Modern sewers helped rid the city of typhoid in the 1890s, trams and tunnels opened up new suburbs after the 1900s, and the urban motorway catered for the boom in car ownership in the 1960s. But three infrastructure projects – above all others – stand out as pivotal in shaping our city.

Queens Wharf (1860s)
The wharf enables the government to move to the city after two devastating earthquakes

As SS Airedale steamed into Lambton Harbour late in the summer of 1863 the noise of is engines subsided, and sailors high in the rigging furled the canvas. Passengers eagerly lined the handrails for their first glimpse of Wellington, and the brand new Government Wharf – its reddish brown timber yet to be bleached by the sun.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Eight years earlier the Wairarapa earthquake had created a three-metre tsunami, which smashed ships onto the harbour floor and washed out low-lying properties along Lambton Quay. When the waves subsided, the seabed had risen two metres, ruining access to the quays. Tectonic uplift and the destruction of wharves meant goods had to be ferried ashore by lighters – very time consuming, and the rapidly increasing size of ships visiting Wellington meant they had to anchor further and further out.

So Queens Wharf was driven by a desire to play down Wellington’s shaky start. The devastating earthquakes of 1848 and 1855 could have been fatal for the young city’s reputation, particularly given Britannia, the New Zealand Company’s original settlement at Petone had been abandoned 14 years previously because of the Hutt River’s tendency to flood. The Chamber of Commerce (then as now an advocate for infrastructure spending) campaigned for a new deepwater wharf – considered ‘a universally recognised want’, with the surviving private jetties hopelessly too small.

The new 122m-long ‘double T’ Government Wharf was a mixture of ironwork imported from Britain and totara from Foxton. Storms delayed the supply of timber and the wharf opened three months late. Stretching out from the city’s first major land reclamation around what is now Post Office Square, it quickly became known as ‘Queens Wharf’ – not in celebration of Queen Victoria’s 25 years as monarch (the first silver jubilee celebrated Kaiser Wilhelm I and was in 1886), but more likely because of its location adjacent to Queens Bond Store.

Queens Wharf was a huge vote of confidence in the 6,000-strong settlement, and a shot in the arm for business, as commercial developments rapidly filled the reclamation. It was seen as ‘a symbol that Wellington was becoming a port rather than merely a harbour,’ said Wellington Maritime Trust D Johnson, and proved so popular the ‘T’s were immediately extended to cope with the explosion of traffic.

The new wharf impressed the Australian Commissioners who visited Wellington in 1864 searching for Parliament’s new home. MPs travelled to their electorates by steamship, and our central location and modern infrastructure proved compelling: the capital moved a year later.


Tawa Flat Deviation (1930s)
Modern electric trains opened up the northern suburbs to created metropolitan 'Greater Wellington’

In the 1920s Wellingtonians enjoyed a comprehensive electric tram network connecting the city’s inner suburbs, but access from the north was far more challenging. Settlements at Johnsonville and Tawa were served by the Wellington & Manawatu Railway Company’s steep single-track railway, with steam engines wheezing through numerous tunnels as they hauled passengers up the gradients on the mainline north.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

For a nation with more than 28 million railway journeys each year (according to Te Ara) the trip into Wellington must have been an embarrassment. There had been little progress since the line’s construction in 1885, and the railway was a chronic bottleneck in the capital’s growth. Rail travel was critical to New Zealanders wishing to travel around the country, and arriving in the capital via a steep single track mixed up with livestock movements did not send the right signals.

The Public Works Department formed a team in 1927 under railway surveyor Arnold Downer to build an express railway over 13km long, with 5.6km of double track tunnels. Downer later led the Mt Victoria tunnel project – his name lives on in the eponymous construction company.

The Tawa Flat Deviation was completed in 1935, and allowed a major overhaul of the Johnsonville line, where cutting-edge English Electric trains were launched with fanfare (and ten speeches from the dignitaries assembled) in July 1938. The ‘delightfully smooth’ journey was completed in 16 minutes – considerably faster than today’s scheduled services. Tawa got its electric trains a couple of years later.

Eyes were firmly on the Mother Country, and the electric railway bears strikingly similarities to the ‘Metroland’ developments that turned the countryside north-west of London into prime commuter belt. Tawa’s new station offered a heated waiting room, and male and female lavatories. It was a big improvement for the passengers, and was the catalyst for the suburb’s population growth from a few hundred in 1930 to just over 3,000 shortly after the war. Johnsonville was transformed from a sleepy agricultural centre nicknamed ‘Cowtown’ to a suburb with booming property prices and a population growing at double the city’s average. Meanwhile Wellington’s neo-Georgian station, opened in 1937, bustled with passengers obtaining news from press-the-button information machines, vying for pies at the highspeed cafeteria and taking nicely-framed pictures of themselves at a shilling a shot. News, pies and selfies – nothing changes.

Enormous pride was taken in showing we could match the Empire’s best, and the Tawa Flat Deviation, track electrification, new rolling stock and the gigantic Gray Young terminus were ambitious undertakings that laid the foundation for today’s Greater Wellington conurbation.

Rongotai airport (1950s)
International connections direct to the heart of the city after removing a hill

Charles Kingsford Smith's first view of Wellington was from the cockpit of ‘Southern Cross’, his Fokker Trimotor aeroplane. The Australian circled above the city at dawn on September 11th 1928, having left Sydney 13 hours earlier, but ended his trailblazing journey in Christchurch: Wellington had nowhere suitable to land.

Illustration by Suzanne Lustig

Kingsford Smith secured his place in history by making the first international flight to New Zealand. Aged 31, he told the crowds his ambition was simply to become the world’s oldest aviator. When he finally made it to Wellington (by ship) he advised Mayor Troup – another aviation enthusiast – that Lyall Bay would be perfect for Wellington’s main aerodrome. A basic airstrip opened in 1929, which often closed over winter when the grass runway became too boggy.

Rongotai was talked about as the ideal location for our city’s main airport for years after Kingsford Smith’s untimely death in 1935, but nearby facilities proved more popular: Trentham’s airstrip handled early mail flights, the Air Force operated seaplanes from its base at Shelly Bay, and by the late 1930s Imperial Airways’ Empire flying boats were a regular sight at Evans Bay. These were the height of luxury, and passengers were often warned not to rush to the lavatories at the rear to plunder the toiletries lest the plane slid backwards out of the sky.

Meanwhile Paraparaumu became New Zealand’s busiest airport in 1949: Rongotai airport had been forced to close two years earlier as the grass runway didn’t comply with safety standards. And Tasman Empire Airways Ltd flew flying boats a four days a week to Sydney from Evans Bay in the early 1950s. The airline’s terminal at Greta Point was decidedly ad-hoc, with garages under the Casa Del Mar apartments on Evans Bay Parade used by Customs to process passengers.

Wellington was missing out. Prime Minister Peter Fraser announced in 1948 that a modern airport would be built at Rongotai, but construction took 11 long years. Passengers onboard the flying boats attempting to land when Evans Bay was choppy must have looked at the building work with longing – waves under two metres high were acceptable landing conditions.

The new Rongotai Airport necessitated moving 3,000,000m3 of earth, and reclaiming 55 hectares of land to create Cobham Drive and the new runway (which was further extended in the 1970s to accommodate passenger jets). The earthworks were impressive, but the new facilities weren’t: the 1937 De Havilland factory was repurposed as a stopgap terminal, which was intended to be replaced by the 1960s. Inevitably the corrugated shed served Wellingtonians until 1999. But the building didn’t matter – we finally had a sealed runway capable of handling the latest aircraft like the Lockheed Electra that flew the Beatles in from Sydney.

Today the decision to build a modern airport 15 minutes from the heart of the city plays a big part in the compact urban form loved by locals and visitors alike – and is every bit as transformational as the Queens Wharf and railway upgrades in previous decades.

First published in the December 2019 issue of Capital magazine

Does Wellington need a 12,000 seat indoor arena?

It's the start of city council election season in Wellington, and I thought I'd look at the detail behind some of the big campaign ideas doing the rounds.

First up: beware any politician who pledges to build a new 10,000-12,000 seat indoor stadium in Wellington in the run up to the City Council elections this October. It sounds like a great idea, until you ask some difficult questions. For example: 

Q: Has Wellington City Council finished paying off debt for building the Westpac Stadium?
A: WCC hasn't started paying back the $15 million debt incurred in 1998 – it was added to the City Council’s general debt, which currently sits around the $500 million mark. The interest payments for WCC’s stadium debt are now around $1 million a year. The Regional Council's $25 million stadium loan will be paid off in 2018.

Q: What happens to the Westpac Stadium if we move the Wellington Lions and Phoenix to the new 10,000 stadium?
A: The Westpac becomes a white elephant, with only half a dozen Super Rugby games and an All Blacks test match if we're lucky. Plus the occasional extravaganza like the Edinburgh Tattoo. Less use doesn't equate to lower maintenance – the grass still has to be mown and the building still has to be looked after. 

Q: Okay, so let's leave the sports at the Westpac. But a covered 10,000-12,000 seat arena would be a great asset for big gigs. Let's build it!
A: Not so fast. The TSB Arena (another WCC asset) has a capacity of 5,655. I agree it's not the greatest venue in the world, but how many events is Wellington going to host where the TSB Arena isn't big enough, and that need to be under cover? How many times a year do the likes of Guns’n’Roses come to town – maybe half a dozen? Are we seriously talking about building a venue that will get such limited use? Even band promoters think it's a bad idea. 

Q: But it'd be cool to have an awesome indoor arena for big music acts, and we'd miss out if we don't build one!
A: Yes it would be great, and yes we might miss out. But while there are many advantages with living in a small city, there are also some downsides. This is one of them.

Marge vs the Monorail (1993)

Q: Aren't ratepayers already already spending quite a bit to upgrade the Basin Reserve?
A: Correct. The City Council has just signed off $21.2 million over the next decade for the Basin's redevelopment. Did I mention we haven't started paying off our late 1990s debt on the stadium? 

Q: Any idea of how much the new arena would cost
A: Figures haven't been worked up yet, but as a comparison the ASB Centre in Kilbirnie cost $47.5 million back in 2007, and the Westpac Stadium cost $130 million in the mid-1990s. A rough ball park figure would put the cost of a new 10,000-12,000 arena at around $60-85 million - around half the cost of the $134.4 million for the new convention centre and film museum.

Q: Could we have a monorail running between the railway station and the new mini-stadium?
A: That's an excellent idea – already covered in The Simpsons. Because there are definitely no similarities between Wellington and Springfield when it comes to wasteful spending.

–––

The City Council's overriding objective for sports venues should be to work with our regional partners across government, sport and the to ensure we have a stadium with the capacity to host the major events we're likely to get in Wellington. 

Yes it'd be lovely to have a dedicated mini-stadium for the Phoenix and Lions, with the ability to host large events for artists like Madonna, but as a city of 200,000 (and a region of 500,000) the reality is it'd be a financial millstone round every Wellingtonian's neck. We need to develop other tourist infrastructure first: major Wellington events see our existing accommodation stretched to the limits, and friends working in Wellington's tourism sector say the city needs two more large hotels if we're serious about economic growth from tourism. Besides, shouldn't we make some progress on getting our outstanding Town Hall back into operation before we chase after the next hare-brained idea?

So I think we're better to start thinking long term about what the eventual replacement for the Westpac Stadium will look like. That might seem like a long way off, but in the competitive world of hosting major sporting events a lack of roof and inflexible capacity will make the Westpac less attractive as other stadia across Australasia are upgraded: the New South Wales Government has just signed off a major refurbishment of Sydney’s Olympic stadium (with demolition of the 17 year old building seriously considered). Athletic Park hosted our major sporting events for a century – no-one seriously believes the same will be true for the Westpac.

Cardiff's Millennium Stadium – configured for concerts

So the eventual replacement will probably be built for a rectangular pitch. Everyone prefers watching cricket at the Basin, and there have only been barely a dozen games where attendance has been higher than the Basin’s 13,000 capacity. Building a multipurpose stadium round an oval pitch is a huge design compromise – so we’re much better to cement the Basin’s reputation as one of the world’s great cricket venues with an extra 5,000 seats.

And a new stadium in Wellington will have a roof. The total capacity will be a little higher than Athletic Park's 39,000 (and definitely more than the Westpac's 35,000 seats), with a layout that avoids the notorious 'sea of yellow' evident for less attended events – perhaps with tiers that can be blocked off for smaller fixtures, or by using drapes. The Welsh have done this successfully with Cardiff's Millennium Stadium – and scaled down version of this would work well in Wellington. 

But this is a conversation to be had in the 2020s. We get one chance every generation to build a major sports facility that adds to the city. Until then we need to make the most of what we've got – and avoid pouring money into 'great Wellington assets' that'll be operational and financial disasters from the outset. 

In the meantime, here's the NBR's Tim Hunter discussing the latest outbreak of the 'stadium virus' in New Zealand. And do try and track down the Monorail episode of the Simpsons, as it didn’t end happily for Springfield. You’ve been warned, Wellington.

First published by Scoop on April 28th, 2016

#BalhamOrTooting – a consultation exercise

www.BalhamOrTooting.org.uk
(see bottom of this post for the full website)

Crossrail 2 is the next of London's infrastructure megaprojects – it's a new underground railway line that will run north/south across the city, and relieve the Northern line and railways running though Clapham Junction. It'll take nearly 20 years to deliver, with the first trains estimated to be running around 2030. But it will transform large parts of London – including my patch, Wandsworth, which despite being in Zones 2 & 3 has poor connections into Central London (and partly explains why we have such high levels of cyclists).

The new line has included a station at Tooting Broadway since the route was initially put out to consultation in 2013. A station in Tooting makes a lot of sense as it's at the bottom of the Northern Line, and the area is ripe for regeneration: improving transport connections will unlock new housing.

My friend Dan Watkins – the Conservative candidate in the 2015 General Election – has led a strong campaign to put Tooting on the Crossrail 2 map, so when we found out last month that Transport for London was considering moving the station to Balham we decided to launch a campaign to engage the local population and see if there was support for a campaign to keep the dream of Crossrail 2 at Tooting Broadway alive.

Normally the Wandsworth modus operandi would be to do a combination of door-to-door petitions and email out a link to a Survey Monkey site. This time I suggested we did something different, so my friend Ben Guerin (an ace web developer) got to work on building a website aimed at raising awareness that there was a choice between the Balham and Tooting routes. I designed the graphics and finessed the text. We haven't spent any money on social media advertising.

First social media graphic

Second social media graphic

TfL produced a great map for the consultation

I also designed a leaflet that was delivered to all homes within walking distance of the stations – and at early morning raids on our local tube stations. The effort to get tens of thousands of leaflets delivered in the space of a week was immense – so well done Dan and team on the ground.

DL-sized leaflet

Dan's dodgy photography – something I can't do from the other side of the world!

And of course Dan followed up with local residents who signed the petition.



The results have shown strong support for the station at Tooting Broadway – which is unsurprising given that Balham is a lot more gentrified, and two stops closer to Central London on the Northern Line. Tooting will have to endure a more intrusive construction phase, but the benefits are much, much greater.

What I did find interesting is how support for Tooting Broadway extended in the areas close to Balham station – I used to live in the Heaver Estate area and would walk to Balham if I was catching the tube into town. A station at Tooting Broadway will see some people from Balham and Tooting Bec travel southwards, so perhaps these results are not that surprising after all.

Here's the infographic I produced which summarised the results. I also produced a version for social media (this required slightly different formatting). I love data – so laying this out was a real treat.



The campaign also helped raise the profile of Dan's work in the community, particularly around Tooting Broadway, where Labour has been historically strongest. I was surprised that local MP Sadiq Khan was so slow off the mark – after all, it's a crucial issue for the future of Tooting. Others noticed this too...

We're thrilled with the results, with a substantial majority of the 2500 people signing the survey living in Tooting. It's helped engage people with Crossrail 2's more detailed consultation – having filled out a number of these I know they're usually the domain of the more determined. And that's the point about politics, right? Yes we need politicians to champion causes, but change happens when whole communities are engaged and mobilised.

Tooting responses

Here's the full website:

The full website (background image stretched to render entire length of page)

(Only) three reasons to vote Conservative in May

The polls say the election’s outcome is up in the air, but one thing is clear – the Tories are close to passing the 36.1% share of the vote won in 2010. No mean feat given the perils and challenges of five years in office. Of course there have been a few facepalm moments (ask me after May and I’ll give you my list) but overall David Cameron’s government has been one of innovation and reform – not a bad record when the books left by Labour offered little room to breathe.

That I’ll be voting for the Tories on May 7th is hardly a revelation given that I stood for council on the blue ticket last May, enjoyed (rather than endured) my first party conference a couple of years ago and have traipsed off to all sorts of by-elections around the country. But forget the slightly tame election promises and #LongTermEconomicPlan – here are three concrete reasons why I’ll be out pounding the pavements for the Tories in the run-up to May 7th – and why you should consider voting for Conservative too.


Apprenticeships

It is the Conservatives who are the party of opportunity – not Labour – and if you want proof of that just look at the how we’ve revitalised apprenticeships. I’m not sure whether it’s healthy to have a favourite graph, but here’s mine. Note how women have been doing better under the Conservatives then under Labour.

In 2010 the Conservatives committed to creating 400,000 apprenticeships. Here we are five years on and we’ve created 2,000,000 apprentices. In comparison Labour’s idea of opportunity was telling everyone to go to university: ‘why do an apprenticeship when you can have a degree?’ This was a betrayal of the idea that some people might actually be able to enter the workforce and secure skilled, well-paid employment by in-work training, paid for by the employer.

Apprenticeships were a massive part of Britain when we made things and exported to the world, but cruelly Blair and Brown saw them simply in the context of their inept class war. Besides, who needs skilled British workers when you’re one of three EU countries not to put in place freedom-of-labour controls when the EU expanded eastwards? Much easier to bring over the cream of the Accession States’ workforce.

And note how quickly Labour have forgotten their disgraceful record on apprenticeships:

Guaranteed with a Labour govt → 80,000 more high quality apprenticeships so every school leaver with the grades has the chance to get on.
— The Labour Party (@UKLabour) February 17, 2015

Wow, 80,000 apprentices. That’s 80% fewer than the Tories promised in 2010, and 4% of the apprentices created during the five years of this Tory government. It is David Cameron’s government that has done the hard work of rebuilding apprenticeships, which are so important in the fight to upskill our workforce, improve productivity – and transform people’s lives.

RT to let friends know we've delivered 2 million apprenticeships since 2010 - helping young people get on in life. https://t.co/n6PdgpNsd5
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) December 22, 2014

Public Transport

Crossrail tunnels (John Zammit)

Like most people in the South East travelling on the railways and underground is a big part of my life, and the good news is that this government has poured enormous amounts of money into future-proofing the transport network.

Labour electrified 13 miles of railway under Blair and Brown. One poxy mile per year in government. In comparison we’ve just about finished electrifying the entire railway from London to Wales in five years. Work on Crossrail (London’s new East-West underground line) is on target for completion in 2018, by which point Crossrail 2 will be well underway – much to the relief of Northern Line commuters. George Osborne was under pressure to cancel these projects, but he recognised how vital it was to have transport that was worthy of London’s position as one of the world’s great cities. Likewise hundreds of railway platforms across the country have been lengthened to accommodate longer trains that are being brought into service – why we’re not shouting about this I have no idea.

And an enormous overhaul of railways in the North-West is being delivered – new electric trains through Manchester on the new Ordsall viaduct, with big service improvements – like Chester to Manchester in under 40 minutes (over an hour at present). Labour likes to think the North is its home turf, but what did they do for commuters in Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Preston, and so on? The Conservatives have made the investment that is helping increase the reliability and capacity of the railways, and helping more people get a seat in the morning.


Leadership

Perhaps the most contentious of the three points, but I really do think David Cameron has shown genuine leadership as Prime Minister in the past five years. He has held together a government with the Liberal Democrats, our most despised opponents. I was on the officer team of a rock solid Tory Association outside the M25 for much of this parliament, and vividly recall our Chairman announcing his defection to UKIP as the first item on our AGM – so I have some insight into how difficult his position must have been.

Yet look at the alternatives. Wind up the government half way though? We’d have been slaughtered in the polls. Avoid addressing gay marriage? Labour would have introduced it from the opposition benches and caused all sorts of havoc. Cameron didn’t bow to UKIP’s agenda, the wisdom of which can be seen as the latter’s credibility disintegrates in the run-up to May 7th. It’s easy to bag Ed Miliband, but has he demonstrated the qualities needed to lead a government as Leader of the Opposition? I – and seemingly many others – think not. And Clegg’s lot has found coalition politics to be as comfortable as snuggling up to a boa constrictor, with single figure poll ratings since 2011. This May will see seats turning blue that have been yellow for decades.

There’s also the issue of the European Union referendum. I’ve always felt our EU membership is like an unhappy marriage: we need to try counselling before we divorce, and that’s what Cameron’s renegotiation is all about. Let’s see how serious Brussels is about changing. The EU is a political construction for wealth redistribution and regulation generation completely at odds with European project’s founding aim of building peace through economic activity, and I’d almost certainly vote to leave. But I want a proper national debate before any decision, and my gut instinct says that rushing a referendum makes a vote to stay in more likely – and then where will we be? Confirmed members of an EU that has little incentive to reform. So the Prime Minister is spot on: 2017 is the right date to hold the referendum.

Perhaps David Cameron will never be held in the same affection as our party’s great leaders, but I can’t imagine he’s particularly bothered. What I imagine he does worry about is getting Britain heading in the right direction after the precarious position that Labour left us in 2010 – and he’s done a pretty good job of that.

—

Which brings me back to my starting point. Back in the depths of 2013 I bet a particularly recalcitrant district councillor £20 that we’d be ahead in the polls in the run-up to the general election – and here we are, ahead in the polls and ready for the heat of the final weeks before polling day. Apprenticeships, transport and leadership are small fry in the bigger picture of rescuing the nation’s economy. But they’re indicative of a government that has taken tough decisions, improved people’s lives, and put us on the right course for the years ahead. That’s a record I’m proud to campaign on – and one that appeals to the heart as much as the head.

First published by Platform 10 on March 25th, 2015

Britain was built by private enterprise – so why is ‘privatisation’ so unpopular?

Lately there’s been a lot of talk about the ‘P’ word: privatisation. Ed Miliband’s team hasn’t done the hard policy work to revitalise Labour as a party of government, and it is beginning to show. His platform for next May has a lot of sticky plaster policies, but very little that addresses structural problems like the housing market and transport costs, to name two issues close to my heart. Instead, catnip like ‘no privatisation of our NHS’ and ‘reversing the privatisation of the railways’ is being wheeled out to fill the Left’s policy void.

This conveniently ignores the Blair and Brown government’s enthusiasm for market – rather than state – solutions. Some people know about Hinchingbrooke, the NHS hospital so ineptly run by the state that Andy Burnham ‘privatised’ it when he was Secretary of State. Fewer know that Circle – the private sector company that took control of Hinchingbrooke along with a 50 per cent staff mutual – has done a decent job of turning around something that was – if you’ll excuse the pun – a real hospital pass.*

Just why is privatisation seen as so politically toxic, when much of what we love in Britain has been shaped by private enterprise? Take tertiary education, where students attend the privately run institution of their choice. Our universities have always been ‘privatised’, with the model of academics and faculties competing for research funding well established. Yet the idea of such a system for our primary and secondary schools would currently be politically unacceptable, even though universities like Cambridge and UCL are world beaters – just look at the latest QS rankings, where four out of the world’s top six institutions are British.

And that’s the whole point of privatisation: creating a market where competition drives improvements in quality and efficiencies in price. Try telling that to the British public, who overwhelmingly want to see the railways renationalised – including a majority of Conservative voters. People dislike their trains being run by foreign state operators, but isn’t the point of the railways to move people around, rather than be some sort of national bauble?

Competition has been fantastic for train passengers in the post-British Rail era. This is hardly surprising given that the great triumphs of Britain’s railways were the product of healthy rivalries between private companies – from the Rainhill Trials through to the speed wars in the 1930s that resulted in Mallard, the world’s fastest locomotive. Our railway infrastructure was delivered by companies not wanting to miss out on market share, but today the government is desperately playing catchup after decades of neglect under state ownership – and building HS2 at a pace that would have appalled our Victorian ancestors.

The 2015 General Election campaign is already well underway, and perhaps you’ll hear someone talking about the evils of privatisation in a queue at the Post Office, only to realise that you’ve never had to endure a 40 minute wait at Sainsbury’s or Tesco. That’s because the supermarkets are in competition, and if they made their customers wait that long they know they’d be out of business. They’re also fairly good at keeping down costs for their users – something that we desperately need in our NHS if the principle of free healthcare for all is to survive the challenges of an ageing population and increasing treatment costs. So that’s the sort of privatisation we should be talking about: driving up quality of service, bringing down costs – and no lengthy waits before the automated voice directs you to ‘Till Number Three’.

First published by Coffee House on December 17th, 2014

* About two weeks after this was published Circle announced that it was handing back its operation of Hinchingbrooke to the state. Writing in the Guardian, former Labour MP Tom Levitt said that 'the failure of Circle at Hinchingbrooke hospital, in Huntingdon, where the company very nearly managed to remove an operating loss inherited from the public sector, was due to the failure of the NHS to deliver its side of the bargain, not least the over-demand on A&E which was well above what the company was told to expect.'

My letter to Professor Arthur, Provost at UCL

Dear Professor Arthur,

I am a UCL Geography graduate, and loved my time at University College. London is an expensive place to be a student, but the biggest single help in managing my finances was riding my bicycle to university every day, rather than being stung by public transport costs.

You may have seen that the Mayor has launched an ambitious programme of segregated cycle lanes in Central London. This has been opposed by a few powerful business groups, and UCL is a member of one of these – London First. However if you've followed the issue you'll also have noticed that top graduate employers are backing the new cycle infrastructure. Deloitte says "cycle highways will help us attract & retain the people our business needs to thrive", while Simon & Schuster says "a growing number of our employees cycle to work. More would if they felt safer on the road".

I realise UCL's membership of London First goes way beyond cycling infrastructure, but I know I speak for my classmates in encouraging you to distance UCL from their hostility towards the new bike lanes. Will you publicly throw UCL's weight behind the Mayor's plans for improving the lot of London's cyclists – many of whom are your students and staff?

Best wishes,


Matthew Plummer

---

POSTSCRIPT (6th November, 2014) Success! UCL has just announced full support for the Mayor's new bike infrastructure – see https://www.ucl.ac.uk/greenucl/greenucl-news-publication/ucl-backs-proposed-cycle-superhighway

A gigantic shunting of workers

Last week the Office for National Statistics published research that found commuters who spend between 60 and 120 minutes travelling to work have lower life satisfaction, see their employment as less worthwhile, have lower happiness levels and greater anxiety. This in itself is hardly surprising, but it is useful to be reminded by hard data that ‘commuting is clearly and negatively associated with personal well-being’. Unsurprisingly the research suggested that people who work from home as the happiest: I’m self-employed, and the rare occasions I’m rammed into a rush-hour Northern Line train remind me just how lucky I am to avoid the daily grind on the underground.

Commuter at Waterloo

Our enthusiasm for commuting over long distances owes much to our historically excellent infrastructure, but also the failure to make modern city life accord with modern needs – not my words, but those of The Spectator back in 1964, which recognised that the ‘gigantic shunting of workers across the London conurbation’ was batty. This is particularly so when you recognise that drivers pay hefty fuel bills and require government to build costly roads, and that railway commuters need billions spent on capacity solutions like Crossrail (and Crossrail 2) while paying eye-watering amounts for season tickets. If your daily commute is an hour each way every day of the week, come Friday you’ll have lost a cumulative working day paying for the privilege of sitting in a traffic jam with cyclists whizzing past you. Personally I’d rather spend my time with my family and friends, rather than listening to Southern tell me that yet again they ‘are’ sorry to announce that blah, blah, blah.

For many people the daily pilgrimage to work is an unwitting yet rational response to decades of poor urban planning. Escaping to the countryside to exercise what Nick Boles describes as ‘a right to a home with a little bit of ground around it to bring your family up in’ is perfectly reasonable given some of the shocking housing built across the country in recent decades. After all, if your home is little more than a shoebox, having a garden for your children to play in is very sensible!

Yet ripping up the green belt to build garden cities simply compounds the cost and misery of commuting. Instead we need higher-quality housing in London and our other urban areas that entices people into living closer to where they work, and to challenge what the ONS describes as ‘inertia’ towards our rigid commuting patterns. Historically Britain’s inner city areas were much more densely populated than the leafy outer suburbs: today the reverse is true.

Fortunately there is hope. New homes are being built at sites like Battersea Power Station to higher design standards, and there is a renewed interest in promoting walking and cycling to work. And adopting new guidelines like ‘Building for Life 12′ means that for the first time in decades we are taking significant steps to avoid blighting lives at the planning stage with the expense and wasted hours of traffic updates and platform announcements – with which the inhabitants of our existing garden cities are only too familiar.

First published by Platform 10 on February 19th, 2014

Has local government in London left cycling in the wrong lane?

A couple of months ago I wrote to the Crown Estate about its bike-unfriendly redevelopment of London’s Haymarket area, and was rather surprised when their London team offered to meet me and set out Crown’s cycling credentials. I was encouraged to see the company's new Central London developments have fabulous facilities for bike commuters, with showers, lockers, and ramps that allow you to ride straight into the basement parking space.

The past decade has seen an explosion in two-wheeled travel across the capital, while car use has declined. Recent data shows that cyclists make up to two thirds of traffic on certain parts of London’s roads. This is hardly unexpected, given the cost of tube travel and packed conditions. So Crown knows that letting its buildings means accommodating the rocketing numbers of people who ride to work.

But, as we discussed the Haymarket redevelopment over coffee, I realised that the challenge facing Crown is that while car use is falling, budget freezes mean parking revenue has become much more important to the balance sheets of London’s inner city authorities. This is problematic for new cycling infrastructure, as installing bike lanes comes at the expense of income-generating street parking.

Catering for cars might superficially help local authorities’ coffers, but a string of studies have shown that bike lanes, locking points, etc. give huge boosts to local businesses: New York City’s recent flagship bike lane on 8th and 9th Avenues led to local shops enjoying a 49% increase in sales. Saving the £1,216 cost of a Zone 2 annual travelcard frees up money to spend in the local economy, and gets people off our overcrowded tubes and trains during rush hour.

None of this washes with Westminster City Council (Crown’s local authority counterpart). The council would be hauled in front of the Competition Commission if its parking business model was the product of anything other than geography – incidentally only a third of Westminster’s households have access to a car. Sadly, as things stand, it’s difficult enough trying to find somewhere to lock up a bike before going shopping in the West End, wasting valuable time that could be spent in the shops and cafes that pay the council’s rates.

The recent spate of cyclist deaths on London’s roads is, obviously, terrible news. But I fear that the cycle lobby’s focus on fixing the Mayor’s flagship Cycle Superhighways misses a deeper problem: how we get the various tiers of local government to confront the sustained change in our transport use. The private sector manifestly gets where the market is at, as was clear when I saw Crown’s magnificent cycling facilities. Unfortunately, our politicians are stuck making rational decisions based on the perverse incentives of the city’s disjointed government structure. With London’s population gaining an extra 600,000 by 2020, this muddled approach is clearly unsustainable. Bold decisions are required.

First published by Coffee House on November 19th, 2013

The Camino offers an insight into the European debate

The Camino de Santiago is the historic pilgrimage route across northern Spain, and as a cultural melting pot it had the recent misfortune of being dramatised as a ghastly film, packed with characters you’d normally walk a long way to escape.

Fortunately the reality is much better, and when I walked the 650 miles from Lourdes to Finisterre this summer the sole person I consciously avoided was an American college kid who sauntered along singing at the top of his voice while emitting a powerful body odour. That he was dressed only in boxer shorts with feathers in his dreadlocks didn’t help matters.

Nonetheless it’s the people who make the Camino a lifetime experience, and offering some wonderful insights into the differences in mentalities across Europe and further afield. I spent the first week plodding across the Pyrenean foothills in endless rain, without seeing a single soul walking west. Company came in the form of random encounters with the locals, particularly around meals. A priest from India at the Bétharram Monastery wanted to talk about the great batsmen his country had produced as we drank broth seated on the long benches of the refectory, with the other monks completely confused until we moved on rugby. And the waiter at one of the bistros who resignedly acknowledged that the French way of life was doomed, which seemed pretty reasonable given that most shops seemed only to be open for a couple of hours in the morning, and with local farms still almost pre-industrial in their miniature form.

On the morning of my third day the butcher in Arundy attached a large scallop shell (the traditional symbol of pilgrims en route to Santiago) to my pack, and from then onwards every boulangerie was a chance to warm up and talk to the intrigued locals, although saying I was walking to Santiago felt fraudulent given that Galicia was still a fair few mountain ranges – and 1000km – away.

So making it to the popular starting point of St. Jean Pied-de-Port after a week on the road was a bit of a relief. Passing through the town’s fortified Porte St. Jacques I was met by a cacophony of languages, frenzied unwrapping of new equipment and nervous anticipation of the first major challenge of the main Camino: following Napoleon’s steep route over the Pyrenees. The sharp early morning climb wasn’t brutal enough to stop the wild hand gestures and emotional outpourings of the girl from California. Nor did it stifle conversation with the chain-smoking chap from Stuttgart, who didn’t understand that a ‘C’ in GCSE German meant my grasp of his language was limited to menus and the occasional war film, and constructing sentences with ‘potato salad’ and ‘hands up’ didn’t seem conducive to the spirit of the walk, or European harmony.

The route itself is inherently cultural rather than deeply scenic, but that’s part of the joy of traversing a large country – you take the rough with the smooth. The back streets of Spain’s isolated villages revealed some of the Iberian Peninsula’s desperate poverty, interspersed with stonkingly beautiful towns: medieval Viana, where Cesare Borgia is buried, was particularly pretty. Dormitories ranged from charmless municipal accommodation to the isolated medieval pilgrims’ hostels where Mass was celebrated by candlelight. And of course the mountains of Galicia were spectacular, more than making up for the afternoon spent walking past Burgos airport and endless kilometres trudging along roadside footpaths.

Hours of conversation with my fellow pilgrims (very few of them British) as we passed though countless settlements also hammered home some important cultural differences. Dutch incredulity at Spain’s lavish yet half-built motorways that intersected our route. The abundance of hairdressers in the smallest of French villages, and American bewilderment at poor European service. The spectacular mountain settlement of La Faba that was run by a German confraternity, where for the first time in weeks I enjoyed a clean shower that worked, with immaculate bunks and a laundry service, my thanks for which were met with a blank “What else did you expect? We are German!”

There were – of course – frequent sightings of flagpoles flying the gold stars of the European Union. I pointed out to my Spanish companion that this enthusiasm would be unthinkable in England, much to his surprise. “Really?” he asked. “Surely we’re all brothers? Aren’t you proud of Europe in the UK?” I felt awful breaking it to him that back in Blighty the EU is seen as a cousin at best – the sort you hear very little from during the year, before agonising about deleting from the family Christmas card list.

First published by Egremont on November 6th, 2013. Read the daily blog I wrote while walking the Camino at matthewsoccasionaladventures.blogspot.co.uk