Christchurch needs a monument to its earthquake; something like… this?

Wednesday, 25 February 2026

The ideal monument would be a centrally located, ruined church. Where might we find one of those?

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright. He is a regular contributor.

OPINION: Fifteen years, a decade and a half, gone by in what seems like minutes. Already our secondary school corridors ring to the feet of children who don’t remember the earthquakes. Another generation and February 22, 2011 will be as distant as the Musket Wars. It will have become that dusty substance, history.

We have erected a monument to those who died in the quake, and rightly so. But where is the monument to the quake itself, the most significant event in the city’s life?

What we need, I’d suggest, is a single totem to evoke the quake and all it meant, something similar to that domed and shattered building in the heart of Hiroshima. It must testify to seismic power and remind us all in perpetuity that we live on shaky ground.

It also needs to bespeak the city that fell, the city founded when Victoria was on the throne of an empire, and that was planned as no other city in New Zealand was. For Christchurch was to be an idealised little England. The settlers brought their religion, their plants and animals and their building habits. Whenever possible they built in stone, because stone impresses and stone endures. But, though they thought they knew all about God, they knew nothing of plate tectonics.

They also brought a class system, ratified and justified by the Anglican church. As the old hymn puts it:

The rich man in his castle/The poor man at his gate/God made them high or lowly/And ordered their estate.

Tourists pose for a photo in front of Hiroshima's Peace Memorial, the remains of the only building still standing in the Japanese city’s centre after the 1945 atomic bombing.

But the feudal fantasy never materialised here for the simple reason that the poor man at the gate hadn’t travelled halfway round the world to remain a poor man, whatever God may have ordained. He saw the new land as a chance to make good. And it was this ambition that gave rise to the famously egalitarian ethos of the young New Zealand.

The ideal monument to capture all this would be a ruined church - emblem of an outworn creed, of an intention that never quite came to fruition, and of a certain hubris. If such a building could be found - its steeple toppled, its roof gone, its nave exposed – the fact that it had not been renovated in 15 years would be evidence enough that the old world was over. And that no one – not the government, not the council, not the ratepayers and not even the Anglican church itself – was willing to pay to resurrect it.

The only thing required would be to stabilise the ruins as they stood and they would go from eyesore to icon in a heartbeat, a ruined shell from the old city amid the glitz of the new. The young would look on it and see how it was. The old would look on it and remember how it was. The tourists would look on it and be moved in a way that they would never be by a reconstruction.

More neatly still, that shell of a building would revert to what it started as, a venue, a gathering point for the people, a source of pride and identity. Imagine the city choir and symphony orchestra within those roofless walls on a summer evening, playing a concert to the open air and a crowd of milling thousands.

I acknowledge that the odds are long against finding a suitable ruin in a suitable location - such as, oh I don’t know, but how about slap bang in the middle of Cathedral Square? - but what a wonderfully evocative reminder it would make that our lives are short, our memories shorter, and our view into the future shorter still.