Nelson improvements
Many of Nelson’s inner-city services, such as stormwater and wastewater, are ageing and inadequate. They barely serve current demands in a shopping centre that is slowly losing operational retail outlets. Shopping is moving to more dynamic places like Richmond and Nelson Junction, or just online, judging by my neighbours’ continual stream of couriers.
Three excellent, long-established cafes have closed in the last six months: the Suter Gallery, Prego, and Red. That follows on from the post-Covid closures of Morison Street Café, Tozzetti Café, and Zumo.
Nelson City Council has finally decided to spend $120 million on two blocks of Bridge Street. You might ask why or how it would cost over $100 million to replace drains in a few hundred metres of street.
Well, it’s a little more than drains. It’s a full revamp of what’s underground, including high-voltage power cables and dealing with a bunch of mature trees whose roots were damaging everything below ground. Also, for some reason, they decided to keep an 1867 brick-lined gravity wastewater drain and repurpose it for stormwater. Some of this is 5 m down.
In the end, it’s also going to be a complete shopfront-to-shopfront makeover above ground with new paving, landscaping, street lighting, etc.
The end? It’s taken from October 2025 to probably July 2027 for two city blocks! It’s something that would take two weeks maximum in China!
And it’s gonna make the rest of the city look shabby.
It will take a while to pay off, so it might take a few years to recover from the cost of it all.