$500m for new Catholic cathedral, school, hotels and car parking in central Christchurch
Friday, 6 December 2019
The long-awaited North of the Square project involves one of Christchurch's most successful developers joining forces with the Catholic church. LIZ MCDONALD takes a closer look.
It's a deal that will bring life and activity to large blocks of almost two hectares of bare land in central Christchurch land.
The half-billion-dollar North of the Square project – announced jointly by the Catholic diocese of Christchurch, property developer the Carter Group and Crown rebuild company Ōtākaro – will develop sites between Cathedral Square and the River Avon that have been parking cars or fenced off.
The development will include up to four hotels being built between Cathedral Square and the $475 million new Te Pae convention centre, while on land bordered by Colombo, Armagh and Manchester streets a new Catholic cathedral, school, church accommodation and offices plus a 600-space parking building will go up.
One – the Carter Group's former PWC office tower site – has been on the city council's 'dirty 30' list of sites considered barriers to the rebuild and is now a nesting colony for endangered gulls.
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* Call for public event space next to Christchurch convention centre
* Prime riverside block in central Christchurch remains barren
* Call for action on wrecked Cathedral Square**
The whole plan has taken over a year to put together behind the scenes, involving several landowners as well as the church and Crown.
It solves several issues for the city at once: how to build several hotels quickly to service Te Pae and minimise disruption to its convention business, how to best use a prime riverside site when the central city's retail and office hubs have shifted elsewhere, where to rebuild a wrecked cathedral and associated facilities, and how to provide parking handy to Te Pae and the performing arts precinct.
Ōtākaro chief executive John Bridgman described the development as exciting and an 'inter-generational change for Christchurch', which would encourage further investment in that part of the central city.
NEW HOTELS
In 2016 the Crown cancelled a public-private venture that would have built hotels alongside the convention centre. It has been in need of a private development partner ever since.
To compete internationally in the fast-growing convention business, Te Pae is said to need adjacent hotels including a five-star hotel to attract major events and has been designed with a direct hotel connection.
In late 2017 it sought developers keen to put hotel proposals forward, hoping to have the key five-star venue ready by mid-2021.
The Carter Group already has hotel interests, having owned Holiday Inns in Christchurch and Melbourne, as well as its industrial and retail investments such as The Crossing shopping centre.
Owner Philip Carter says five-star hotels are very costly to build and developers cannot recoup that money, so such a project works better for him as a package with complementary hotels.
He will build two hotels initially at Te Pae – one a five-star – to be finished by April 2023, followed by one or two more hotels near Cathedral Square.
The five-star hotel will sit on Colombo St opposite the end of Gloucester St, the central library Tūranga and Cathedral Square, with the others stretching back towards the river frontage.
Between them a public walkway will link Cathedral Square to the riverfront.
To complete the project Carter will buy at least some of the 6600 square metres of Te Pae hotel precinct land from the Crown, which bought it from private owners as part of the city's anchor project scheme.
What price the Carter Group will pay taxpayers is not yet public, with an Ōtākaro spokesman saying releasing that information was 'up to them (the Carter Group) at this stage'.
THE CATHOLIC PRECINCT
In mid-2018 Carter and and the Catholic diocese of Christchurch's property and development manager Tony Sewell reportedly got into a discussion about a new central city precinct for the church.
Carter had originally wanted to develop his riverside land and thought the church could use it if he was to build instead at Te Pae. He says the plan 'just felt right for the city'.
Three other owners of the land making up the rest of the 1.24-hectare block would need to come on board to make the church plan work.
The church had considerable damaged assets around the city after the earthquakes, with the most high-profile the much admired but now severely damaged Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.
This year Martin announced the cost of repairing the old cathedral could not be justified, and the diocese would consolidate its 12 city parishes into east, west, south and north hubs, plus a central hub to replace churches including the cathedral.
With feelings high over the loss of both the existing cathedral and suburban parishes, and two new suburban churches also to be built, final decisions are yet to be made over which land will go.
However, an estimated $26m from selling surplus property will be added to insurance proceeds and fundraised cash to pay for the new development.
With Carter working to pull the deal together, this year the church bought investor Ben Gough's land between Armagh and Manchester streets and the river, plus land owned by Victoria Apartments Ltd at the other end of the block diagonally opposite the Town Hall.
It then did the deal with Carter for his land running from the PWC site to the Armagh-Colombo corner, while the last remaining site owned by Millennium and Copthorne Hotels opposite Victoria Square is under negotiation.
When the Catholic church built its existing cathedral more than 100 years ago, it was in the southeast corner near the old gasworks, while the Anglicans built theirs at the heart of the city they had founded.
Martin says they are keen to be at the heart of the city, in a precinct that will be both handy for their congregation and other members of the public, and help revitalise the central city.
'We want to make it a place to bring people together,' the bishop says.
The new cathedral is not yet designed, but will be raised on a podium and may incorporate features from its demolished predecessor.
It will house up to 1000 people for masses or other events such as school gatherings.
Post-quake immigration has boosted the number of the Catholics in Christchurch, who now outnumber Anglicans in the city, according to Census data.
All going well, the new Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament could be ready for use by 2025.
The school to be built alongside will be a new venue for St Mary's Primary, a 125-year old multi-cultural school with just over 100 pupils now several blocks north on Manchester St.
Completing the precinct will be a multi-storey building on the old PWC site. The site's flooded foundations will be recycled for the new parking building, which has been submitted as a proposal to the city council which wants a privately-built public parking building near the performing arts precinct.
Attached facilities will hold Catholic clergy, plus diocesan office workers who are now housed in a Sydenham building next door to the city's Family Planning clinic.