After two decades of promised redevelopment, Johnsonville Shopping Centre remains neglected and half empty. Joel MacManus searches for answers in the decaying suburban mall.
The sign over the entrance of the Johnsonville Shopping Centre has a stain on it. Huge, brown-green streaks of mould no one has bothered to wash off. The logo underneath the stain is a 90s-era art deco depiction of a rising sun, in orange and turquoise. It’s not flashy, but it’s friendly and warm. There was a time when this mall represented hope, excitement, a new dawn for the northern suburbs of Wellington – but that time has long passed.
The inside of the mall also shows signs of neglect. The lightbulbs in the low-slung ceiling seem to have given up. They’ve grown dull, and flicker from time to time. By my count, there are 19 empty shops, compared to 31 still open. The brightness has been turned down on the remaining shops, like they’re afraid of being above their station. “It’s a dead mall. The quietest mall in New Zealand,” says one former retail tenant.
The anchor tenant is a Countdown supermarket. All the Countdowns in New Zealand are gradually being rebranded as Woolworths, but they haven’t reached here yet. In fact, the outside of the store is still lime green with red lettering from before the last rebrand. There’s a bigger, newer Countdown just across the street.
In some places, mall management has made a half-hearted attempt to cover up the wounds. One empty shop has been converted into “Playland”, with a couple of kiddie slides and some seats. Another has become “The Creativity Space”, one of the least creative environments ever built by man; an undecorated room filled with food court tables and six board games. The local Rotary club has turned the former Michael Hill Jewellers into a community library, complete with a selection of books you could find for free at a refuse shop.
Even the people seem to have less lifeforce. Pensioners shuffle through, their shoulders weighing them down. A man in ratty track pants slumps on a bench, smelling of stale smoke. I’m pretty sure he’s asleep.
To say it’s like an abandoned wasteland in a zombie apocalypse would be too cliche. With its sterile LED lights and stench of death, Johnsonville Shopping Centre is more like a hospital.
In Zampelle’s Tea and Coffee Lounge, the ceiling tiles are tinged yellow, a remnant of an era when smoking was allowed indoors. Longtime friends Bill and John are drinking filter coffee and Earl Gray tea, respectively. They’re both retired, and come here most mornings. They’re sitting at different tables so they have room to spread out a copy of the local free newspaper, The Independent Herald.
“I remember we first came here in 1973,” says Bill. John corrects him. “No, it was 1971. We came after the North Wellington game, but back then it was called Johnsonville Villa.” His memory is right, Johnsonville Villa became North Wellington AFC in 1972.
Johnsonville Shopping Centre first opened in 1969. The original design mimicked an outdoor shopping plaza, with cobblestone concrete floor tiles, hanging flags and pot plants. In 1993 it was given a dazzling white makeover. For a time, Johnsonville was a humming shopping destination. “It used to be better, there were a lot more people coming in,” John says, forlornly. Unprompted, the two start rattling off a list of shops from the mall’s heyday that have since left: ASB Bank, McDonalds, Paper Plus, Sounds Music, EB Games, Hallensteins, Cotton On, Brumby’s Bakery. Even the St Vincent de Paul op shop is gone.
Bill finishes the last of his coffee and stands up, slapping both of his thighs. “Right, I’m off to the TAB.” It’s 9.08am at the Johnsonville mall.
Zampelles is a time capsule, a traditional New Zealand tearoom, the kind that went extinct sometime around Y2K. A long, wooden lunch counter runs across the side and back of the room. The self-service cabinets are stacked high with piles of the best food you ever ate at a church potluck. Asparagus rolls, corned beef and mustard on white bread, and steaming golden sausage rolls. Plain scones with raspberry jam and whipped cream. Lamingtons, afghan biscuits and big, fat wedges of cake.
“It used to be better, there were a lot more people coming in.”
Graham Salisbury, who owns Zampelles with his wife Liz, brings out my breakfast order: A “medium” flat white in an enormous bowl of a mug, bigger than any you’d find in central Wellington, and three poached eggs served on generously buttered slices of TipTop SuperSoft white toast. “I chucked on a third one ‘cos the eggs are a bit small today,” he says. They’re delicious.
Salisbury has a beaming smile and a mane of white chest hair poking out of his polo shirt. He’s a bowling ball of a man filled with electric energy. His voice is gravelly but warm. He holds his chest out, but not in an aggressive manner, more like he’s really chuffed with himself all the time. Which, honestly, he deserves to be. He’s been running Zampelles for 26 years and built it into a Johnsonville institution. What does the name mean, I ask. He responds with a shrug, “Nothing really, it’s just French. Just a French name. That’s it.”
In a previous life, Salisbury was an electrician. He worked on the mall during its last refurbishment in 1993. A couple of years later, he was offered the chance to buy the cafe. The change of lifestyle was appealing. He’d never worked in hospitality before, but that wasn’t a concern, he says. “It’s basic stuff, it’s only Edmonds Cookbook stuff.”
“I’ve always loved lamb’s fry, bacon and gravy, so I started selling that. We’ve been selling that for 26 years now, we’re known for that. Mince and eggs on toast is another one of our big sellers. It’s the older generation that keep coming back, of course. That’s why we can’t get rid of our Edmonds Cookbook stuff like the lamingtons and the eclairs. I’ve tried through the years to put paninis and all this new stuff, but I always got people saying, ‘Where’s my lamingtons?’ So I thought, ‘Stuff it, I’ll just keep going.’”
The condition of the building has deteriorated. The roof leaks constantly. “We put buckets on the table all the time. It gives the customers a bit of entertainment,” he says. “They’re still fixing this shit up”. Recently, he had to shift 10 customers out of the way because the ceiling was bulging and he was afraid it might cave in.
The mall’s owner, Stride Property, has announced four separate redevelopment projects over the years. Each time there were plans and artist’s depictions, resource consents, and men in suits with their photos in the paper, but nothing ever happened.
Customers keep coming here for a taste of the past, even as the mall declines around it. “It’s our regular customers mainly here, but there is bugger all foot traffic,” says Salisbury. As more shops close, there are fewer reasons for customers to come into the mall, which makes things even harder for the shops that remain. “I think Stride’s gone a bit too bloody hard on some of them. To keep the shops full they should be reducing the rent a lot more,” he says.
He and Liz almost closed Zampelles in 2021, a combination of Covid-19 and the high costs of rent. “I said, ‘I’m out if you’re gonna keep charging these prices’.” He tried to negotiate with Stride Property, but found the company difficult to communicate with. “I tried to get hold of someone. No one replied, no one replied. I sent email after email. I said you’ve gotta send someone down and sort this out.” Eventually, he worked out a number he was willing to pay while still operating at a profit, and sent a letter informing Stride he was closing at the end of the month unless it could meet his price. “You’ve gotta be ready to close and be committed. I said to Liz ‘hey darling, we might be getting out of here’.” “Good,” she’d responded.
The Salisburys got the deal they wanted, and decided to keep Zampelles running for a few more years. But soon, like the version of New Zealand it represents, Zampelles will just be a memory.
Johnsonville was named after timber miller Frank Johnson. In 1841, he bought a 40 hectare plot of land, roughly where the mall is today. Johnson cleared the entire area of native bush, sold the timber and the land at a huge profit, and promptly left New Zealand forever. The suburb is located 7km from the Wellington city centre, almost perfectly equidistant between Wellington, Porirua and the Hutt. It’s well-connected, with a train, a high-frequency bus service and a motorway. It has a population of 11,000, with 40,000 people in the wider area.
From inside the artificial purgatory of the mall, you’d think Johnsonville is an area in decline. But you’d be wrong. All indicators suggest Johnsonville is a suburb on the rise. The population is growing, and getting younger. It’s an increasingly popular area for first home buyers, who like that it is cheaper than the city without an excessively long commute.
Wellington city councilllor Ben McNulty is one of them; he’s 36 years old with a young family. He grew up locally and attended Onslow College, but never thought he would be back. When he and his wife started looking for their first home, they wanted to live “somewhere cool, like Berhampore or Hataitai”, he says. “We couldn’t afford cool. So, we started looking in the northern suburbs and we found our house in Johnsonville.”
The demographic shift is slowly bringing some youthful energy to Johnsonville. “We’re the next Newtown,” McNulty insists. “One day, we’re going to be the cool place to live. To be clear, we are inherently not right now. We are nowhere close to having a Newtown Festival or a creative spark the way they do, but we’ll get there. Genuinely, it will happen.”
The biggest barrier in the way of that future is the mall. Like most Johnsonvillians, McNulty has a self-deprecating attitude towards it. “It hides a sense of embarrassment,” he says. “It’s a joke – a funny joke, it has to be. Instead of crying, you laugh about it.”
The person most often credited with inventing the modern shopping mall is Austrian architect Victor Gruen. He wanted to recreate the covered shopping arcades seen throughout Vienna, a meeting space that was walkable, mixed-use, and formed a cohesive part of the neighbourhood.
His vision has been bastardised. Suburbs built around malls become disconnected and car-dependent. Commercial-only malls are surrounded by giant moats of concrete car parks, which make the surrounding streets unfriendly to pedestrians. The mall can start to dominate at the expense of its neighbours. In the evening, it is an empty cavern, sucking life out of the area. When a mall is poorly designed, it doesn’t enhance the neighbourhood, it extracts from it. And when it falls into decay, as has happened in Johnsonville, there isn’t much left at all.
By the end of his life, Gruen despised his own creation. In a speech in 1978 he said: “I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.”
Earlier this month, McNulty and fellow local councillor Diane Calvert introduced a notice of motion urging the council to explore using the Public Works Act or other forms of compulsory acquisition if Stride Property continued to let the mall fester. It passed unanimously.
When he appeared in a newspaper story about the council motion, McNulty got a message from an old schoolmate from Onslow College. He pulls out his phone and reads it to me: “I remember eating chips in the food court with you after school during sixth form, talking about the mall redevelopment coming soon. Suffice to say, you and I have more than doubled in age since then.”
Stride Property is a publicly listed company with a $1 billion portfolio of commercial property. It also manages three other large property funds through its subsidiary, Stride Investment Management. Through its various portfolios, Stride Property owns the mall, the car park, most of the surrounding retail buildings, and another large section across the road, the site of a second Countdown supermarket.
There are three main shopping streets, which form what locals call the Johnsonville Triangle. Stride owns 91% of the land inside the triangle, and 26% of the land in the Johnsonville metro centre zone. In total, the company owns 45.5 hectares of central Johnsonville land, more than the 40 hectares Frank Johnson had when he was the only bloke living there.
Without most residents even realising it, Johnsonville has been captured by a single corporation, which now holds the entire suburb’s future in its hands.
“We couldn’t afford cool. So, we started looking in the northern suburbs and we found our house in Johnsonville.”
Almost every South African in Wellington is a regular customer at Schekter’s Deli, a specialist food emporium famous for its biltong and boerewors. Steven and Valda Scheckter started the shop out of a bakery in Brooklyn in 1998, then moved to a larger premises in Petone the following year. After 23 years in Petone, they downsized to a new location in Johnsonville Shopping Centre in 2022. It was a major coup for the mall and generated a bubble of excitement among the locals.
After two years in the mall, Steven Schekter isn’t impressed. “We’ve definitely seen a drop off in foot traffic coming into the mall. We only survive on our own customers really, because we are a destination.”
He’s frustrated with Stride Property’s management. “We have no information from them. They’ve done nothing. They don’t spend anything fixing the place up. They don’t give us any communication…. they’re totally unresponsive.” He doesn’t see a future for his store in the mall. “Our lease has got a year to go and in all probability we won’t stay here. We just feel that we brought something to the mall, and they haven’t brought anything to the party.”
When put to Stride Property, a spokesperson says: “Johnsonville Shopping Centre regularly communicates with its retail partners, and as part of our commitment to meeting our lease obligations, we respond to maintenance issues [and] we aim to respond as quickly as possible.”
There’s a strong community among the retailers at the Johnsonville mall. They have a WhatsApp group for discussing security issues or any other concerns. There’s a sense of collectivism; they need each other to succeed in order to bring in foot traffic.
They’re frustrated about the rising cost of rent, not only for their own bottom lines, but because it is driving away other businesses. A retailer, speaking to me anonymously, points out two recent closures: a beauty salon, which shut down after a rent increase, and a kebab shop which left for a cheaper location. “If we got more shops in, we’d get more foot traffic, and we’d have an opportunity to make more sales. But these guys never let anyone in,” the retailer says, “This management is shit, man.”
In response, a Stride Property spokesperson says: “Johnsonville Shopping Centre’s rental agreements vary and are confidential contractual arrangements made with our retail partners…the majority of our rental agreements have not contractually increased in recent times, and our rental arrangements remain highly competitive.”
Bruce Graham, the owner of Home & Knife Edge, is a polite, reserved man, and has a more optimistic outlook for the mall. He opened his shop four years ago in a smaller space in the mall as a specialty knife store and has since expanded into a wider range of homewares.
He’s being patient with Stride’s management. “They’ve been good as far as we’re concerned. They said development is going to happen, but it’s not going to happen for a couple of years yet,” he says. “I’d like to see them spruce it up a little bit. But are they going to spend a million dollars to spruce it up just to knock it over in a few years?”
He’s wary that McNulty’s council motion and the media focus around it (including this story) could make things worse. “Our concern is that it will stop people coming to the mall even more, and that’s a real worry for us.” He’s already sensed a growing cultural stigma against the mall. “There’s no need for it. Sure, not all the shops have leased, but you can go to most malls and that’s the case.”
Christian Parnell, the lone staff member at Gordon’s Outdoor Equipment, looks bored. It’s almost lunchtime and he’s only made one sale so far. “It usually gets a bit busier around 2pm but there’s no guarantee anyone will buy anything,” he says, looking out over a wall of tramping boots and Gore-Tex jackets.
Until recently, he had the rare dual honour of working in one of the mall’s shops while owning another. In 2023, he and his father started ClawCade, an unmanned video arcade, in a previously empty retail spot. “There were so many dead empty stores, we thought we’d bring families and kids into the mall, it would be something to do in Johnsonville. And it really did bring a lot more people into the mall, according to the other vendors,” he says.
ClawCade soon came into conflict with Stride Property’s management. The arcade’s biggest revenue earner was a zombie simulator, The Walking Dead Arcade Game. According to a Stride Property spokesperson, the mall received “several customer complaints regarding the explicit and violent content of a game at ClawCade, as well as the arcade unit’s position being so close to the main pedestrian thoroughfare”.
Parnell turned the gore down to zero and moved it away from the entrance, but after ongoing complaints from customers, Johnsonville Shopping Centre requested that the unit be removed from the retail space altogether.“They were basically bombarding us with complaints about how we ran our store,” Parnell says. “It didn’t feel very fair on us.”
“As soon as we removed the biggest machine, the one that was guaranteeing profitability, we started making a loss and could never recover. We put other machines in there to replace it but they didn’t do anything. That was the best machine we ever had … Eventually enough was enough, we had it all sold and shut the shop down.” Today, the former ClawCade space is still empty.
Greg O’Connor sits at Muffin Break, gingerly sipping a Keri orange juice. He’s just been at the dentist and is still slurring from the anaesthetic. Passing customers constantly smile and wave in his direction. He seems to know everyone by name. The 66-year-old Labour MP is an old school electorate MP. He will probably never be a minister, but he gets re-elected because he’s a stalwart of the community, a reliable figure that everyone seems to know. As a fellow Irish Catholic from the South Island, he looks like 10 of my uncles combined.
When he’s knocking doors around Johnsonville, asking people about their local issues, he gets the same response, over and over again. “They’ll look back at you and say: ‘Well, the bloody mall’,” he says, mimicking an exasperated tone. “All roads, all conversations, whenever you are having a conversation about matters local, they all lead back here – ‘That bloody mall’.”
“It really is impacting on the health of the whole area. It impacts how people feel about themselves, especially the older generation who remember what it was like. It’s in their faces. They’ve seen it decline before their eyes.”
As a former police detective, he’s spent the past few years trying to solve the mystery of why none of the redevelopments have happened
The first one, from 2007, is simple enough to explain: it ran into the global financial crisis. The second attempt, in 2016, ran into the Kaikōura earthquake. Queensgate Shopping Centre in Lower Hutt, which Stride Property also owns, was badly damaged in the quake and those repairs took priority.
In 2017, Stride got a new resource consent for a two-storey development, including a new cinema complex and 900 parking spaces. By that point though, the design was considered outdated. Retail-only malls are struggling globally; developers now prefer mixed-use malls connected to apartments or offices.
The latest proposal received fast-track approval in 2021 under the Covid Recovery Act. It was very different to the two-storey commercial malls that had been proposed previously. The drawing shows an 11-storey tower, a combination of office space and subsidised social housing.
Stride Property seemed excited by the concept. In fact, the company wanted to go even bigger. Jarrod Thompson, Stride Property’s senior development manager, wrote to Wellington City Council last year asking to increase Johnsonville’s 35 metre building height limit. “Stride is currently preparing a masterplan for a mixed-use development at the Johnsonville Shopping Centre site to provide for retail, office, residential, public amenity, medical, food and beverage and entertainment activities. It is proposed that the site be developed over time and at a far greater density and height than that currently enable,” he wrote.
“To support investment in Johnsonville and enable the development of high quality buildings that provide public amenity, it is critical that the permitted height limit in the Johnsonville core is increased to at least 50 metres.”
There have been no updates since. Once again, the project seems to be languishing in development hell. When I ask for details of any future plans, Stride Property’s general manager of shopping malls, Roy Stansfield, is vague. “We continue to work on options for the future of the Johnsonville Shopping Centre. However, we are not in a position to provide you with a detailed update at this time.”
In parliament earlier this year, O’Connor called for Stride Property to sell the mall. “It’s time now for Stride Property to put up or sell, because it is just now unacceptable the impact it has on my local community, on the whole of the northern suburbs, by having this pretty ugly sort of edifice in the middle of it, non-functioning — it’s time to go. It’s time for Stride to sell,” he said.
That’s easier said than done. This is where things get a bit complicated. Stride Property only owns 50% of the mall in its publicly listed portfolio. The other 50% is owned by one of Stride’s funds, Diversified NZ, which it manages on behalf of two Australian superannuation funds, Hesta Super and Aware Superfund. The $400m Diversified NZ portfolio includes Queensgate Shopping Centre in Lower Hutt and Chartwell Shopping Centre in Hamilton. Johnsonville Shopping Centre is its smallest holding. The decision to hit go on any redevelopment of Johnsonville Shopping Centre requires unanimous consent from all three shareholders, Stride, Hesta and Aware.
In parliament, O’Connor said he believes Hesta is the shareholder holding up the current redevelopment. Two retailers say they were told the same story by Stride Property staff. (Stride did not directly answer questions about the shareholding arrangements. Hesta directed questions to Stride.)
Hesta is a Super Fund for healthcare workers with $68 billion under management – more than twice the size of the largest Kiwisaver fund in New Zealand. Its stake in the Johnsonville Shopping Centre is worth roughly $12m, or 0.018% of Hesta’s portfolio. It’s a tiny little fleck on a speck on a dot on a dust mite.
Stride Property’s financial records value the Johnsonville Shopping Centre is valued at $48 million, based on land value alone. From a purely financial perspective, there hasn’t been any urgent reason to take on the risky redevelopment. The mall continues to return a comfortable profit. Despite the stained facade, deteriorating building, and the community’s embarrassment, the mall is still profitable. From its 50% stake in the mall, Stride Property has reported a net share of profit between $900,000 and $1.2m in each of the last four years.
As I walk through the mall, chatting with retailers and customers, a baby-faced security guard starts eyeing me up. I finish an interview and he approaches me, almost apologetically. “Hey bro, management says I have to take you upstairs.”
It turns out “upstairs” isn’t even in the same building. He leads me outside, across the carpark, to a boxy, utilitarian two-storey office building. We climb a set of wooden stairs and reach the top of the tower that lords over this small retail fiefdom. Johnsonville Shopping Centre manager Kirsty MacGregor is waiting for us at the top.
“You need to come and request that you are allowed access to the centre from me or my centre management team,” she tells me. “You can’t go and talk to the retailers individually, and you definitely can’t film or take photos.”
“It is a public space,” I argue.
“It’s not, it is a private space,” she responds.
“Can I speak to you for a few minutes for an interview about the mall?” I ask.
“Oh my god no, absolutely not. I can’t do that, it would need to go through Stride head office. You’ll never see a comment from me personally or my team.”
I am banished, cast out from the warm embrace of the Johnsonville mall. In the harsh outdoors I’m buffered by a bitter Wellington wind. I feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again. I feel so paper thin, like a house of cards, one blow from caving in.
After my dark night of the soul (4-6 minutes in a car park), I find shelter across the road at Waitohi library. The contrast between the two buildings couldn’t be starker. The new library, opened in 2018, is a gorgeous space built out of glass, steel, varnished wood. Grand timber columns reach up to the ceiling, a reference to the tōtara and rimu that stood here before Frank Johnson came along and cut it down. The library is connected to a swimming pool, a community centre, a kindergarten, an outdoor plaza and a playground. It’s a cohesive community hub.
At Common Ground, the cafe that shares an open wall into the library, every table is full; parents meeting up with a university-aged daughter, a group of mums with babies, a 20-something couple holding hands and making eyes at one another. A group of primary school students on a class trip are pulling books off the shelves, two girls hide under a table and giggle when their teacher catches them. The building is buzzing with life.
From the second-storey window, there’s an open, expansive view over the suburb. There are thriving trees framing the train station, and people milling around by the bus stop. In the distance, houses are dotted along Paparangi Ridge. But it’s hard to focus on any of that when the foreground is dominated by the tired carcass of the Johnsonville mall.
It’s still unclear when, if ever, the long-awaited redevelopment will happen. For now, the Johnsonville mall continues to die a quiet, neglected death. Johnsonvillians continue to live in hope, even if that hope is dwindling by the day. Maybe someday they’ll have a mall to be proud of. Maybe someone will clean the stain off the sign.