Most bridges are marvels of sleek engineering, but the City to Sea Bridge takes an almost contrarian approach. 

Wellington in 1990 was definitely a vibe. Despite a grinding recession that had dragged on since the sharemarket plunge three years earlier, cash was being splashed on a bunch of big civic projects that would redefine the city. The capital’s waterfront, locked away for decades behind cast-iron fencing, was finally being opened up as public space. A whole street had been closed off to begin the creation of Civic Square, and a brand-new library by Athfield Architects – its playful columns shaped like nikau palms – was being built to overlook it. Even more surprising: the square and the waterfront were about to be linked by a ravishingly eccentric structure: the City to Sea Bridge, designed by John Gray and the late Rewi Thompson (Te Aitanga-a-Hauiti, Ngāti Raukawa ki te Tonga).

So much has changed since then. The library is being completely rebuilt, the Town Hall is mired in an interminable renovation, the council has abandoned its Civic Square offices, and City Gallery is closed. And now the City to Sea Bridge is under serious threat of demolition because of the cost of seismic strengthening.

Wellington faces a range of impossible choices. Cities need to grow and evolve while retaining some sort of collective memory in their built environment, and there’s no perfect way to do it. Everyone has their heritage fetish: talk of the importance of retaining old villas drives me insane, but I have a particularly soft spot for the City to Sea Bridge. I’m writing this piece in an attempt to explain why.  

Wanting to know more about the bridge was one of the things that led me and my friend Jade Kake to make a book about Rewi Thompson and his often underappreciated genius.

Lots of people think Ian Athfield designed the City to Sea Bridge as an extension of his firm’s work in Civic Square. Athfield and Rewi were friends who worked together on Capital Discovery Place – the short-lived children’s museum under the steps on Civic Square – and an unsuccessful proposal for Te Papa with Canadian-American architect Frank Gehry, the designer of the Guggenheim Bilbao. But the City to Sea Bridge is the creation of Rewi and architect John Gray – who’s currently engaged in the campaign to save it.

Gray moved to Wellington from Australia in 1974 and was appalled at what he found. “I nearly turned around and went home again, I was so horrified by the barrenness of it all,” he remembers. “There was negligible street life and the waterfront was out of bounds.”

The bridge he designed with Rewi played a big part in changing that. In the 1980s Gray had joined the Wellington Civic Trust, a group that demanded the harbour board open the waterfront for public access. He ended up on a panel of experts charged with determining the waterfront’s future and was eventually asked if he could work with Rewi on the bridge.

Most bridges are marvels of sleek engineering, but one of the reasons I love the City to Sea Bridge is that it takes an almost contrarian approach: it is lumbering in stature and idiosyncratic in its layering of details, an enthralling multi-chapter journey from the city to the lagoon. From Civic Square, you climb the steps past Matt Pine’s huge Oamaru stone sculptures and wander through a split pyramid topped with actual pounamu, a representation of Te Wai Pounamu, the place from which Māui threw his net to fish up Te Ika a Māui. The net is represented in the intricate brick paving on the landward side of the bridge; several drawings in Rewi’s archives show his painstaking experiments with the patterns and colours of the bricks to get the net effect just right. 

I think my favourite part of the bridge is its timber midsection, because of the way it tilts you slightly into the view and forces you to contemplate it. Here, Gray says, “you’re on something equivalent to a headland – you can scan the horizon and look back to the city.” The bridge’s hefty wooden sides provide shelter and screen out the traffic passing on Jervois Quay below. There are little spots to sit and contemplate the fantastically rustic wood and metal sculptures of the late Paratene Matchitt, a great artist whose legacy is forever tainted by an indecent assault conviction.

The bridge almost seems as if it collapses into its descent to the lagoon, barely supported by a cacophony of fractured concrete panels (a seismic reference) that make up the metaphorical cliff atop which the viewing platform stands.

I can’t think of another civic structure like it, in New Zealand or anywhere else. We mustn’t forget that granting a Māori architect an important public commission then was a radical step, one that represented a commitment to a different kind of future. The bridge speaks of a unique time in Wellington’s history, one that was brimming over with a new self-confidence (not coincidentally, the Absolutely Positively Wellington campaign was launched in 1991). “The mayors during that period, they were salespeople,” says urban designer Stuart Niven, who joins my video call with John Gray. “They knew all about pitches and how to position a city. There were wonderful things going on, and the more people saw happening, the more they got excited. And that excitement infused the city in all sorts of ways.”

It’s impossible to imagine the Wellington City Council – or any large city council in the country at the moment – generating anything like the kind of excitement Niven describes, let alone talking up an expensive bridge when a pedestrian crossing might suffice. It may be that we live in an uninspired age. But there is also an urgent and unglamorous need for attention to basics like housing, the capital’s ailing subterranean pipes and creaking transport infrastructure.

Funnily enough, Rewi had a famously casual approach to the lifespan of his designs, regarding their possible demise with rare equanimity. It’s possible that, if he were alive, he might take the same easy-going approach to this one. For my part, I know I’d miss the City to Sea Bridge terribly if it was gone. When I lived in Wellington I crossed it several times a week, never tiring of the way it made the magic of the city and its moody harbour coalesce. I still notice new details in it, a process that feels as if it makes me see the whole city afresh. But this isn’t about me: I don’t have the burden of choosing between Wellington’s competing priorities. My only hope is that the choice of retaining the bridge is made with the consideration and affection it deserves – the same consideration and affection that would be given to any other heritage structure that tells a compelling story of the place it calls home. 

Rewi: Ata haere, kia tere by Jade Kake and Jeremy Hansen is published by Massey University Press.