A heritage delight to never to tire of

I call regularly at Christchurch’s quaint 135-year-old Antigua Boatsheds. I stop for coffee or a lunch break snack. It’s an agreeable place to socialise.

It is one of a small number heritage buildings to emerge mostly unscathed from the earthquake of February 22, 2011. That is mostly thanks to heritage restoration work previously undertaken by present owners Mike and Sally Jones. Prior to their efforts the boatsheds were merely sitting, unfastened, on the riverbank.

The predominately green buildings appears to be earthquake damaged but they have had a habitual lean for as long as I have known them.

Antigua Boatsheds are the sole survivors of six or so boatsheds along the Avon. Antigua was built in 1882 by two Lyttelton boat builders, Albert Shaw and J.T. Tidd.

My memories are of hiring a boat when a grumpy old man was owner. He was Bill Dini.

Dini, said to have the air of a Mediterranean boatman, owned Antigua from 1948 to 1978. His grumpiness was likely related to us kids hiring a boat for one hour and turning up back at the boat sheds two hours after our hour had expired. Of course, we did not pay for our additional hours. In not demanding extra payment he might have displayed a streak of kindness that went unnoticed to us ungrateful youngsters?

In another time, with notebook and camera, I would have welcomed his company. He had previously been associated with the de Havilland Aircraft Company and pioneer New Zealand aviation. He also collected old phonogrammes and was associated with Radio Ferrymead.

Dini sold Antigua Boatsheds to Maurice and Diane Phipps.

Then, in 1986, they sold to their daughter Sally and her husband, Mike Jones. The couple recently commemorated 30 years of ownership.

They had converted the milk bar to a classy riverside café, leased part of the building to Punting on the Avon and introduced bicycle hire. (Mike Jones is, himself, a keen cyclist. His ID number 625 from the grueling Le Race event has been proudly displayed in the café.)

Mike and Sally managed to navigate through the cordoned city following the February 22 earthquake. They found their boatsheds looking mostly okay. But what a shambles inside to clean up.

Luckily, Max the boatshed’s cat was a survivor.

The Jones’s were up and running within weeks. Punting on the Avon resumed over Easter 2011. A sharp downturn in visitor numbers following the earthquakes did not help business. Nor did the old Antigua footbridge being cordoned off and finally rebuilt help matters.

But that is, as they say, water under the bridge. The popularity of the boatsheds over the first days of 2017 is encouraging despite the occasional long queues at the service counter.  

Mike and Sally believe they have the right business model for the Heritage-listed building. They have no wish to change it and thoughts of retirement are off the agenda.

And that suites me fine. Few locations in the city give me more pleasure than sitting on the river’s south bank on a warm summer afternoon and enjoying all the water action with the boatshed’s backdrop. It is, perhaps, a reincarnation of a paragraph from Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows:

Believe me my young friend, there is nothing –absolutely nothing –half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.