THE rebuilding of Christ Church Cathedral, Christchurch, in New Zealand, has been mothballed because of a lack of funding, it has been confirmed.
Work was finally under way to repair the extensive damage caused by two earthquakes in six months more than a decade ago (News, 25 February 2011); but an $85-million financial shortfall was discovered in April. Earlier this month, the New Zealand Finance Minister Nicola Willis said that the government would not use further taxpayers’ money to bail out the project because the cathedral was a private, religious space.
The decision to pause the restoration, reported by local media last week (News, 16 August), was confirmed on Tuesday. Christ Church Cathedral Reinstatement Ltd (CCRL) had met on Monday to consider its options.
In an interview with Chris Lynch Media on Tuesday, the Bishop of Christchurch in the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and Polynesia, the Rt Revd Peter Carrell, said that the decision had been “tough, but inevitable”.
Being forced to cease construction, he said, “was always a possibility, but we kept our hopes very high that funding would come from the government, and that this would help us to get to where we wanted to be”.
Bishop Carrell said that he had contributed to the cost of the project, alongside other private donors. “We are still committed to the cathedral being reinstated. It is now going to take a bit longer.”
This was not always the object. After the cathedral spire collapsed in 2011, the Church decided that the damage was too severe to repair, given that the building had been insured for just $39 million. Plans for demolition were drawn up to bring the building down to a height of two metres, from which a new cathedral would be raised.
This plan was fiercely opposed, however, by the Great Christchurch Buildings Trust, and the High Court ruled that the demolition plans were not unlawful but incomplete. Disputes over the method and overall cost of restoration resumed, and, in 2013, the battle was taken to the Court of Appeal.
In the same year, a temporary building, nicknamed the Cardboard Cathedral — a cardboard, wood, and glass structure designed by the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban — was opened several blocks away from the original site in Latimer Square. It continues to offer cathedral services and events, and music, art, educational, and visitor programmes. The plan, eventually, is to sell this site to contribute towards the completion of the restoration.
In 2016, as discussions about the restoration continued, more earthquakes caused further damage to the cathedral.
In 2017, a working group recommended that the building be reinstated at a cost of $105 million, funded by $25 million in government grants and $10 million from the city council. That year, the Anglican synod voted in favour of reinstatement, but in 2020, after delays from the pandemic, costs increased from $50 million to $154 million, and work did not begin in earnest until 2022.
Bishop Carrell said that the site was not currently safe for tourists to visit. “I lived in England once; there are all sorts of ruins you can visit there, but you don’t worry about earthquakes and them toppling on you while you’re visiting them, having walked across an open field to get there.”
The focus now was on fundraising, he said, and controlled tours of the construction site.
He concluded: “We still have a transitional cathedral, and worship and services continue there, and, of course, all our other parish churches continue business as usual. But I have invested a lot of time, energy, and effort into the reinstatement, and I will continue to do that, and so this is not an easy time.”
To finish the build, he said, about $134 million was needed: $85 million to fill the funding gap, which he said was key to giving confidence to the diocese and donors that the project would be completed; $26 million in ordinary fundraising; $16 million from the diocese, including the estimated proceeds of selling the transitional cathedral site; and $7 million of city council money, which was yet to arrive.
It was, he said, “a lot of money, but it’s part of being a fabulous city, which Christchurch is.”
The chair of CCRL, Mark Stewart, told The Press on Tuesday that, because of the government’s “short-sighted” decision, another $50 million could be added to the cost for every decade the cathedral sat idle. “By just kicking it down the road it’s actually making it worse and more expensive and harder to solve.”
The shortfall was reduced from $114 million to between $75 million and $85 million after the synod agreed last month to cut costs. This reduced the overall cost of the project from $248 million to between $209 million and $219 million. Besides the $25 million already contributed by taxpayers, the project has received $3 million from Christchurch City Council, $33 million of the Church’s $44-million insurance payout, and $24 million from a $50-million appeal.
Work to “demobilise” the site will begin next week, including removing scaffolding and making the building weatherproof. Mr Stewart said that CCRL had enough in the bank to cover immediate costs.
The project director, Keith Paterson, told The Press that maintaining the site could cost $5 million initially, and up to $1 million a year thereafter. This would include paying for the storage of 15,000 items, including 5000 pallets of stone and 38 totara-wood trusses from the cathedral which are currently stored in warehouses across Christchurch.