THE MARINE DRIVE

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 136, 10 June 1937, Page 10

THE MARINE DRIVE

"FINEST IN DOMINION"

BETTER IF CLEANED UP

TWO YEARS TO 1939-40

The City Council has decided that the Evans Bay foreshore must be put in order and that shacks and boatsheds which encroach upon the chainwide road reservation must be removed so that the roadway may be made shipshape for the traffic which will use it during the Exhibition period. As about thirty of the sheds and shacks are within the road line they will have to go in any case when the roadway is widened, but it was the untidiness of'this section of the Marine Drive which was particularly stressed by councillors when the decision was made. Unfortunately the Evans Bay length of the drive is not peculiar in its degree of untidiness, and no matter how splendid may the grounds of the Exhibition be made, if trees and shrubs and flowers can be made to grow where none have grown before, the local effort will be spoiled if the general effect of the Exhibition surroundings—which will include Wellington's Marine Drive route to and from Rongotai, Evans Bay, Lyall Bay, Island Bay —are in poor contrast. Lyall Bay and Island Bay are in unhappy company in that neither is a finished job .and neither, even in summer sunshine, have that souvenir postcard air about them. Each has an unfinished promenade and seawall. Lyall Bay's wall is nearer completion, but it has been left with a straight-from-the-moulding surface for years now and the spaced columns —whether for ornamental light standards, urns, or pot plants, perhaps no one remembers now —unfinished and rough. Between Onepu Road and Kingsford Smith Street the seafront road is unfinished, but this is a work which will be put in hand without any doubt, for it will carry-a big volume of car traffic during tfre six months of the Exhibition and the macadam and sand construction would be hammered to pieces. Lyall Bay has lost a good deal .of its popularity as a bathing beach during recent years, for cars make longer runs to the outer beaches easy, but the beach will come into its own again in 1940 and the bathing accommodation that stands at Lyall Bay now, dark, cramped, and utterly out of date, will not do then, either for people 'who may want to combine seaside and Exhibition or as an advertisement for Wellington. RUINS NOT PICTURESQUE. On the corner of Onepu Road and Lyall Parade are the remains of a tearoom fire of eight, nine, or ten years ago, and if eight, nine, or ten years, why wait another three, which will carry the relic over the Exhibition period? Oh along Queen's Drive are more eyesores, the city paving plant and the jumble that has collected about it, and opposite, the wreck of a concrete shed which was pretty well blown to pieces by a violent southerly eighteen months, ago. It is the ugliest single structure on the Marine Drive, and is just too strong for another southerly to finish properly. It does not appear to be serving any particular city purpose, except that it takes the eye from the jumble about? the paving plant. LEFT AT THAT. If Lyall Bay has been left unfinished it still compares very well indeed with Island Bay. Here, too, a seawall and better promenade were planned, but the seawall job has been left half finished and the extension of the promenade towards the western rocks is a disgrace; a rough fill has been made with rotten rock and left at that. Some years ago a children's play area was set out, planted and in part smoothed and surfaced—and left at that. Now it has run wild. And so back to the city, after a Marine Drive scenic run, along Island Bay Parade, with grass verges at the roadside, by the sketch plan green and smoothly mowed; but in fact tended and completely neglected in about the proportion of one in three. Some few years ago there was enthusiastic talk about the beautification of the Parade by planting, sowing of grass verges, and Sunday morning mowing, in which everyone was to take a hand. Trees were planted, but the community effort never came to anything, and if fishing gear on the beach is untidy—well, so is the average grass frontage on the Parade.

The laying out of Exhibition grounds will be only one part of making Wellington an attractive city. A considerable expenditure will be required upon a series of what may be termed ancillary city works, to improve access by widened roadways, to lay down new lengths of tram connection, and to build new tramway and bus rolling stock, but if Wellington is to uphold the claim that here is one of the finest waterfront drives possessed by, any city then a fair share of this special expenditure must go to the completion of unfinished work on the drive and the clearing up of untidy lengths.

A fair an,d not expensive start could be made upon the wreck opposite the paving plant.