Oriental Bay Beach Development
Concept Development
(Click to enlarge)
Esplanade footpath, April 2003
Car parking, April 2003
Images from around Oriental Bay, April 2003
Over the last 50 years, Oriental Bay's foreshore has evolved in a very unplanned way especially around the Freyberg area. Sand, which came from overseas, was dumped there during World War 2. From then on there have been several different haphazard changes and additions.
The Wellington City Council had to make a decision, either to let Oriental Bay degrade and in time have the sand shift away from the shore due to the severity of the storms that Wellington experiences, or given the Bay's popularity, do something to improve the area. The “Wellington Waterfront Development" project focusses on the nearby waterfront which extends along Taranaki Wharf and in front of Te Papa, Museum of New Zealand. The next phase of this development project is the “Waterfront Park" which will transform the Chaffers area between Te Papa and Oriental Parade. The Oriental Bay foreshore development project is technically not part of the “Wellington Waterfront" project but is a geographic extension of it. The very strong link between the two and the popularity of Oriental Bay were good reasons to improve the standard of the area (Conceptual statement). No matter what time of the day or night, workdays, weekends, public holidays people can be seen walking, boating, relaxing, or exercising around the foreshore of central Wellington and Oriental Bay.
The catalyst for the project was a proposal put forward in 1996 to construct a small new beach east of the Band Rotunda. This proposal expanded into one to redesign Oriental Bay's entire foreshore area spanning 800 metres of coastline.
