RiverLink ramps up as Hutt braces for years of disruption

Saturday, 8 November 2025

Anecdotes scattered through Hutt Valley’s history make one thing clear: Te Awa Kairangi Hutt River may be beautiful and tranquil on a good day, but its destructive power when the weather turns should never be underestimated.

The infamous 1858 floods, when the river burst its banks at Taita, killed nine Pākehā settlers and rendered one of the Hutt’s first hotels, The Aglionby Arms, uninhabitable.

The festive cheer of 1976 was washed away in dark humour, as Belmont was jokingly renamed “Bogside” after river torrents swept through the Hutt Valley just days before Christmas, leaving Stokes Valley and Pinehaven declared disaster zones.

In 1991, Wellington region officials began developing a strategy to manage the flood risk facing New Zealand’s most densely populated floodplains, centred on Lower Hutt’s urban areas. A decade later, they released the Hutt River Floodplain Management Plan — a 40-year blueprint to protect residents from a potentially crippling flood.

Billed at $1.5 billion, RiverLink is the Wellington region’s second-largest infrastructure programme, just after Transmission Gully.

With work set to ramp up in late November to bring the long-planned Te Wai Takamori o Te Awa Kairangi RiverLink project to life, officials are warning of “unavoidable” traffic disruption. A newly released timetable of road closures shows some key arterial routes will be shut for months — and in some cases, years.

Within a narrow 450-metre corridor between Melling Link and Ewen Bridge, three authorities — Hutt City Council, Greater Wellington Regional Council and NZTA — must coordinate overlapping plans to build new stopbanks, widen and deepen the Hutt River, relocate Melling station 300m south, and construct a new State Highway 2 interchange along with two new cross-river bridges.

The works mean the river will flow better and water will be directed away from the city centre in any serious flood. It’s hoped that RiverLink’s package of infrastructure upgrades, a new riverside park and refresh to the CBD’s streetscapes will combine with the nearby Queensgate Mall and Dowse Museum to lure more people into calling Lower Hutt home.

Jon Kingsbury, the Hutt City Council’s Riverlink programme sponsor, likened coordinating the project’s multi-agency work plan to a game of Tetris: “We’ve spent a lot of time over the last 12 months working on what we call a coordinated delivery plan of who’s doing what and when, given it’s such a small area.”

The first signs of disruption will be when Wellington Electricity starts work on moving a major power cable running along Rutherford and Connolly streets. The project will start on November 20 and run for six months. The regional council, responsible for RiverLink’s flood defence upgrades on the banks, could not start work without the cables moved, Kingsbury said.

Melling Station will close on Christmas Eve and won’t reopen until it is relocated and the new footbridge completed — expected around late 2028. In the meantime, the Melling Line will terminate at Western Hutt Station.

After Christmas, the northern section of the Riverbank carpark will be closed in January to make way for the new interchange and bridge, but the brunt of disruptions to the Lower Hutt CBD’s key routes will come in thick and fast in the new year.

The remainder of the carpark will close in mid 2026 to allow for stopbank works and associated river works. The popular Saturday morning Riverbank Market will remain in the Riverbank car park but move slightly south once the northern section closes. It’ll move to Dowse Square later in the year .

The section of Queens Drive between Rutherford and High streets will close for three years from early 2026, as it’s the planned connection point between the new Melling interchange and local roads. The stretch will be widened and raised by 3 metres to align with the new bridge.

Roundabouts linking Queens Drive and Rutherford and High streets will be replaced by traffic light-controlled intersections.

Parts of Rutherford Street — from the local Woolworths to its junction with Melling Link — will close for one night in early January for layout changes. Meanwhile, the High Street and Queens Drive intersection will be cordoned off for six to nine months from next March to prepare for increased traffic and upgrade underground wastewater and stormwater infrastructure.

Without the closures, the council believes, the new interchange and bridge couldn’t be built. “We need to upgrade the intersection,” Kingsbury said. “With all of the pipes and main utilities going through one place, it makes sense to do it in one go.”

A section of Pharazyn St north of Marsden St will be closed early next year, while Daly and Block streets will close permanently to be made into stopbanks – work on Melling Station’s new walking and cycling bridge cannot proceed unless they are completed.

Kingsbury said the council aimed to give residents as much notice as possible about traffic disruptions, so they could plan ahead — especially those who use affected roads or commute via Melling Station.

Originally priced at $700m and expected to begin in 2023, RiverLink was slated for completion in 2027. But cost pressures saw the price tag soar past $1 billion, forcing the project to be “sliced and diced.”

Instead of a diamond-shaped design, the new Melling interchange was refashioned into a “half clover” that uses fewer retaining walls.

It took so long to put RiverLink into place that the regional council – responsible for $295m of the programme – kicked off work on its share to upgrade flood defences between the Ewen and Kennedy Good bridges, citing the need to get on with the job to protect central Lower Hutt from flooding.

So far, more than 120 houses in Melling have been demolished or relocated to widen the river and upgrade stopbanks north of Melling Link. Further work was paused last October while awaiting final design details for the new interchange.

Following a sod-turning ceremony in September to mark the start of construction on the grade-separated interchange — set to replace the current traffic light-controlled intersection by 2031 — NZTA and its alliance of construction firms have already begun one of their first tasks: re-lining and refurbishing the Western Hills sewer mains, which carry sewage from Upper Hutt.

At the moment, it might look to SH2 commuters that workers were just digging holes in the ground, said the agency’s alliance project director Matt Fairweather: “You won’t be able to see much from above.”

Over the next three months, workers would “pre-load” the land so it would not settle later, Fairweather added, but the most visible work on the interchange would start in February, when ground improvement piles were added to stabilise the ground.

“It sort of being built like Lego up from the bottom,” he said. “We start at the bottom, move things out the way, get them in the right place, and then build our way up.

“You won’t see the finished bridge until we’ve done some work in the ground.”

For decades, Lower Hutt’s urban development largely overlooked the river’s edge, shaped by past planning rules and government direction that saw the city centre primarily as a commercial zone rather than a space for residential or recreational use.

“For too long we’ve run away from the river and it was only a matter of time before the banks burst and the city was flooded,” Kingsbury said. “We’re making sure that doesn’t happen.”

In the new year, once the regional council finished with its stopbanks, the city council could start thinking about Riverside Park. “We want a beautiful park along the river where people can go and eat their lunch, go for a walk, bike, scoot,” Kingsbury said.

Despite earlier delays, Kingsbury was confident the programme would stay on schedule, with contingencies already built into the timetable. He was also adamant that, despite the road closures, Lower Hutt’s city centre remained open for business — encouraging residents to shop locally and assuring that the council would support businesses to adapt, plan, and stay visible throughout the changes.

“There will be times where the river gets quite high and we might lose the odd day here and there, but we’re pretty confident that we’ll be able to deliver, to the best of our knowledge and the information we’ve got now.”

In the end, the disruptions the construction caused were short-term pains for limitless benefits to the city and its residents, with a revitalised city centre that was accessible for people to live, shop and entertain.

“It’s going to be awesome,” Kingsbury said.

*CORRECTION: This story has been updated clarify that the northern section will close in January to make way for the new interchange and bridge, not to become a worksite. The timing of the closure of the carpark has also been corrected, and the reason for its closure. ((Story updated November 8, 2025, 3.11pm)