Advocacy

Since its formation, Historic Places Wellington (HPW) has focussed its advocacy on contributing to council planning processes and on a number of heritage buildings. Please click on the link to read more about each building:

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Our chairperson Felicity Wong gave a presentation to U3A Wellington city on 31 August 2021 on Built Heritage Challenges. You can read a summary of it here. One of the challenges is city planning – as outlined in “‘Character’ at risk” below.

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In addition to our work on the buildings above (as noted on the relevant pages) we have made the following submissions; you can download a PDF copy by clicking the links.

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‘Character’ at risk

Thorndon houses

In 2020 Wellington City Council issued a Draft Spatial Plan. “The Spatial Plan is essentially a ‘blueprint’ for our city that sets out a plan of action for where and how we should grow and develop.”  The draft plan reduced current inner city “character” areas (where pre-1930 houses generally need a resource consent before demolishing) by 71%. We opposed this drastic reduction. You can read our submission below or click here.

The Council received over 3000 submissions and voted on a revised plan (which ‘only’ reduced character areas by 50%). However, the council voted to go back to the c. 71% loss of the draft plan in its District Plan. You can read more and see how each councillor voted in this Scoop article.

The late Ben Schrader, urban historian, wrote this opinion piece on 1 July 2021. There has been further consultation on the Draft District Plan and Proposed District Plan. We have made submissions on all of these.

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