Catering for tourists while leaving intact what they have come to see

MSCNewsWire, Tuesday 7 June 2016 - Now that tourism is overtaking dairy to become the biggest industry, the problem remains of heritage destinations especially those on the main north-south traffic routes accommodating the surge without in the process wrecking their appeal to the very visitors they seek to attract.

Greytown’s ribbon development athwart state highway 2 poses the problem in miniature. Its historic Main Street is also the main road.

The solution has been to push development back into the narrow hinterland allowing the preservation of the Victorian atmosphere while providing literally in-depth the retail resources required by visitors.

District developer Steve Pilbrow’s boardwalked latin quarter-meets- mall design levers off the borough’s central art deco style garage, more recently a supermarket, and with some tweaking here and there extends it through to the next parallel street.

This allows visitors to the town’s coffee shop and style shop tourist theme to have their cake and eat it and do so away from the main road.

Nothing was dislocated in the process, an ancient walnut tree preserved.

The new development, named the Greytown Hub, presumably after the garage parking lot it replaces, was opened at a modified mardi gras, a subtle reminder that the town’s activities are not necessarily curtailed by the setting of the sun- even in winter.

Meanwhile, district planning authorities are forced to consider the possibility of the recently installed Greytown hypermarket squeezing its way back onto the same main road, Main Street.

Neatly sequestered out of view on the old Bouzaid and Ballaben textile factory site the supermarket shows signs of bursting through to Main Street via an amply signed deliveries access that is considered by conservationist to be far too intrusive.

Just because it is the Wellington region’s only heritage destination means that New Zealand’s first inland town requires careful handling, if only from an economic point of view.The pioneers ensured that Main Street was wide enough to turn an ox cart in thus ensuring that there was room to spare even for today’s onrush. The trick for their successors is to ensure that the buildings along the route from the point of view of visitors remain redolent of those earlier times.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk Tuesday 7 June 2016This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.