Celebration of a motorway: Transmission Gully gets commemorative book

Wednesday, 1 November 2023

The front cover of Alastair Grant’s book, showing the northern entrance to the motorway looking over the Kāpiti Coast.

Only in Wellington would a motorway get its own commemorative photo book.

But that’s just how special Transmission Gully is after so many years of waiting for it to come.

Wellington photographer Alastair Grant’s book, titled Transmission Gully - Celebration of a Motorway, documents the construction of the motorway from 2015 until 2022, when it was opened to the public.

The book was self published and self distributed by Grant and is his third collection of landscape photographs.

Among the images are before-and-after shots which capture how inaccessible wilderness was carved out and replaced by the long awaited road from Kāpiti to Porirua.

Grant said he came up with the idea while photographing the inlets and bays around the area.

“I had two revelations. The first one was ‘how the hell do you photograph a motorway and make it interesting?’ So I broke it down into sections under seven headings.

Alastair Grant took seven years to create his project, after more than 80 trips to visit the site of the motorway.

“The second one was to buy a drone.”

What makes Transmission Gully interesting is the contrast of landscapes. The Kāpiti Expressway further north goes over flat planes, highlighting that the highway is a public convenience first and foremost.

Transmission Gully is different because of the landscapes. Deep valleys, imposing cuttings through hills, and the way the road winds and sweeps to the capital gives it a more striking appearance.

In the eyes of any layperson, it’s clearly an incredible feat of engineering.

What’s more, the landscape the road travels was inaccessible private land before it was built. There’s an exploratory element to traversing the road.

Grant said he was captivated by the techniques and methods used to construct the highway through such difficult terrain.

“One of the most intriguing verbs I heard was ‘daylighting’ - to replace a hill with daylight.”

“It’s exactly what they’ve done. At the Wainui Saddle, they dug down 70 metres.”

A lone tree by the site of Transmission Gully before construction on the Wainui Saddle in 2016.

The road was over 100 years in the making when it opened, replacing the old Centennial Highway coast road, which was prone to congestion and crashes.

The new motorway bypassed the route inland, as well as bypassing Pukerua Bay, Paekākāriki, and Plimmerton.

One example is a heading titled “The Tree” which focuses on a lone tree in a paddock at the southern end of the Wainui Saddle.

A series of pictures shows the tree standing where it is while the landscape around it transforms from inaccessible bush and farmland into State Highway 1.

Grant said he’d recorded 85 trips out to the site.

“I’d try to go up once a month. A bit more in the summer and a bit less in the winter because there was less work going on.”

The same tree on the southern end of the Wainui Saddle after the motorway was close to completion in 2021.

The rear section of the book is titled “curiosities” which Grant described as “where photographer lets loose”.

The section captures details and patterns along the site, some of which go unnoticed and others only seen fleetingly by passing motorists.

Obvious ones include Gareth Morgan’s rainbow bridge, which is painted in vibrant rainbow colours and often adorned with mannequins and figurines.

However, Grant captures less obvious details like his image of the terraces and drainage ducts which almost form geometric patterns on the page.

Grant reflected on the completion of the motorway and the change it had caused.

“Paraparaumu feels much closer now. It’s really become a suburb of Wellington, just through the creation of the highway.”

Grant is working to make copies of the book available in major retailers, starting with Wellington and expanding out to other centres.