Old Lyttelton (for Richard)

These are old survey maps and photographs of the intersection of Lyttelton's Winchester and Canterbury Streets.

A north-easterly view across the intersection in 1858.

An 1860 survey map.

The north-west corner about 1865.

A survey map showing the extant buildings in 1867.

A circa 1890 elevated north-easterly view (above). At the north-eastern corner, the home of the Tobacconist William Wales Junior was completed with the addition of a western wing by 1901. The same house photographed in 2007 (below).

Hatherly's grocery shop on the southwest corner in 1901.

The 1860 Anglican church of the Holy Trinity and the 1880 vicarage at the southeast corner, photographed prior to 1906.

19 February 1873

The original proposal for an Anglican cathedral for Christchurch called for an iron and glass structure along the lines of London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition building. Regretfully, this design was abandoned in favour of a more conventional neo-Gothic structure in stone. Thus it was that the foundation stone of Christ Church Cathedral was laid on the 16th of December 1864, but by the following year construction plans had been halted as a consequence if inadequate funding.

On the 19th of February 1873 the Anglican Synod voted on a motion to sell the cathedral site to the Provincial Council for public offices, for the sum of £10,000.

An alternative site was proposed for a section of three and a half acres on Durham Street, between Gloucester and Armagh Streets, opposite the Provincial Council buildings. It was also suggested that economy could be effected by letting the frontages for building sites conditionally on the fronts of the houses erected thereon facing the Cathedral. If this were done, the Synod committee suggested that the Cathedral would stand upon the northern frontage of the land and the tower would be on Armagh Street.

The proposal was defeated by only one of the thirty-five votes and construction in Cathedral Square resumed in 1875, with the building being completed eight years later.

Now and Then: Christ's College

More than a century apart, these photographs are views of the south-eastern side of the quadrangle of Christ's College on Rolleston Avenue.

To the Left in the earlier image is the Architect Benjamin Mountfort's 1859 Synod Hall and Library for the Anglican Diocese of Christchurch. Built in the medieval Gothic revival style, it was demolished in 1919. The building's original doorway and portico survive as a gate between the College grounds and the Botanical Gardens.

Podcast: A Decent Burial

Hindsight is the only feature program on Australian radio devoted exclusively to social history. Hindsight offers new perspectives on and insights into the past, through stories that may be well known, or may have been ignored, or erased from the public record.

Contrasting the cultures of Sydney and Melbourne, this discussion is relevant to the Canterbury experience, which like New South Wales was a Church of England dominated settlement. The ongoing similarities are even more pertinent where there is diversion from the original subject.

The 55 minute program examines changing attitudes to the dead and their burial, from the ad hoc early days of the penal colony in Sydney through to the late nineteenth century and the creation of the very grand Rookwood Necropolis.

Throughout the colony's early history there was an ongoing tussle between church and state for control of bodies of the dead, exacerbated by the struggle between church and church as Protestants and Catholics accused each other of impiety; while underlying all this was always the thorny question, 'What do we do with the bodies of the poor?'

Download the 25 Mb mp3 audio file

Conservative Christchurch Bishop Elected

26 February, 2008 - Victoria Matthews, who was the first woman to be elected a bishop in the Anglican Church of Canada, has reportedly been chosen bishop of the diocese of Christchurch in the Anglican Church of Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia. Under the church's rules, her nomination must still be approved by the province's house of bishops and members of the General Synod.

More at the Anglican Journal of Canada

8 March, 2008 - 9th Anglican Bishop of Edmonton, Matthews, who was nominated twice as Canadian primate, pulled the church in a more conservative direction...

More at the Edmonton Journal

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