Saving the Basin?

There is noth­ing like a good loc­al debate, and there is no debate in Wel­ling­ton at the moment quite like that sur­round­ing the Basin Reserve fly­over. There are many reas­ons for oppos­ing this pro­ject, which seems an expens­ive and back­ward-look­ing way of mov­ing traffic con­ges­tion 200m to the east. How­ever, ‘Sav­ing the Basin’ is not one of them.

The group oppos­ing the fly­over have decided to attach the city’s love of the ground to their cam­paign, call­ing them­selves ‘Save the Basin’. At best, this is disingenuous.

The Basin is a won­der­fully Wel­ling­ton type of place. Foun­ded as a res­ult of an earth­quake, added to sporad­ic­ally and remod­elled 35 years ago, it is an eclect­ic mix­ture of the old, the new­ish and nature. It is also eas­ily the country’s prime ven­ue for test crick­et, and even cas­u­al crick­et fans in this city have an attach­ment to it.

The fly­over will pass the north­east side of the ground. A new stand will be built, join­ing the R.A. Vance stand and the north end of the bank, with the bonus of repla­cing the Vic­tori­an pub­lic toi­let-like gates. The stand will be four stor­ies high, and is being paid for by the New Zea­l­and Trans­port Agency. It will be used primar­ily as new chan­ging rooms for the ever-increas­ing demands of inter­na­tion­al crick­et squads. If you have ever been under the R.A. Vance stand recently, you will know just how import­ant this is.

The offi­cial pur­pose of the new stand is to block noise and fumes com­ing from the fly­over. The fact that it will also block a fair bit of wind should not be ignored.

There has also been a lot of stir­ring about the effect of this increased traffic noise at the ground. Devotees of crick­et there will know that the traffic noise is all part of the charm of the Basin. It is, after all, the country’s biggest round­about, and you rarely get an hour of play without some sirens circ­ling the venue.

Save the Basin are high-pro­file, organ­ised and com­mit­ted to the cause. But when one of their lead­ing cam­paign­ers tweets some­thing like “Still time to save Basin Reserve from fly­over & see Corey Ander­son play crick­et in Wel­ling­ton for 2015 World Cup”, you real­ise that they are not as con­nec­ted to the sport, or the ground, as they would have us believe. All Wel­ling­ton matches at next year’s World Cup are being played at West­pac Stadium.

While all this noise has been going on there is anoth­er major issue affect­ing the ground: the zom­bie-like status of the his­tor­ic Museum Stand. Its roof was red-stickered fol­low­ing the Christ­ch­urch quake, and the cost of strength­en­ing it is estim­ated to be in the vicin­ity of $6 mil­lion. Clearly, that will not raise its book value by any­thing like this amount.

While the Crick­et Museum remains intact (and this is an under­rated asset on the Wel­ling­ton museum scene), the stand itself can­not be used as it awaits its fate. The logic here appears to be that no prob­lem is so big that it can­not be deferred.

Tellingly, the Save the Basin group have been deaf­en­ingly quiet on this issue. They have not con­tac­ted those involved with the Crick­et Museum, which is a bit strange giv­en that they are the only her­it­age organ­isa­tion act­ively work­ing at the Basin.

So, Save the Basin, keep up the work with regards to inner-city trans­port issues. But please leave us crick­et fans, and lov­ers of the Basin, out of it. We can see right through your brand­ing and we feel a little used.