Les Harvey - Interviews with the creator of the Parnell Village

Les Harvey – sticking a wounded city together again
By Neil Illingworth, The Auckland Star, June 27, 1977

As bulldozers have ripped the heart out of old Auckland since the war – smashing down the brick and timber buildings of the 19 th century to make way for towers of glass and steel and concrete and glass – a man who is passionately in love with the way the city used to be has been fighting to stop them.

That man is Les Harvey … craftsman, fanatic, philosopher, artist, millionaire, lover of old bricks, enemy of progress, owner of dozens of beautiful old buildings in Auckland which he has vowed to preserve for the future.

Les Harvey. He describes himself as a clown. People either love him or hate him; there seems to be no middle way. He owns much of Parnell and big chunks of Ponsonby and bits of streets here and there in the heart of the city. And you can bet he's going to own a lot more before he's through.

Yet he insists he owns nothing. He's just a custodian looking after beautiful things so they will be preserved for people to enjoy them.

Barrel of a man
Les Harvey … how does one describe him? He's short and round, a barrel of a man. In his typical polonecked sweaters and ragged corduroy trousers, he doesn't look like the millionaire he must be. More like the owner of a junk shop, or a round-the-world yachtie who's come ashore for the hurricane season.

His eyes sparkle with vast energy when he talks to you and he gesticulates with his hands as though he were conducting an orchestra. In a way, or course, he is … coaxing and guiding and bullying very substantial areas of Auckland into being what he thinks a city should be.

Talking to Les Harvey is very stimulating and at the same time very frustrating. He explodes with ideas like a string of crackers going off. When you ask him for facts he talks about magic and beauty and memories.

Somehow you never quite seem to get an answer. Then you realise that everything he says is an answer, is something about his vision of what Auckland city should be.

Walk with Les Harvey down any street in Auckland and he will tell you about its history … That lovely old brick building is where hundreds of jobless Aucklanders queued for the dole in the Depression of the 1930s … In a converted stable down this lane a toymaker used to work, or a man making toffee in a 60-gallon vat.

“This is what Auckland used to be all about,” he says. “People have to have a sense of continuity in their city or it won't be theirs and they won't want to come here.”

Les Harvey is best known for Parnell Village, a collection of old houses at the top of Parnell Rise which he has rebuilt into a charming collection of boutiques and craft shops and restaurant, surrounded by towering trees in sunny courtyards.

Aucklanders and tourists love to wander round the shops, or sit in the sun having coffee at the open-air café.

But the Village is only one of his projects for preserving parts of the old city as sunny places for people.

“I'm trying to stick a wounded city together again,” he says. “If I had enough money I could save the whole of Auckland .”

Coming from anybody else, that would sound like an attack of megalomania. But Les Harvey is passionately in love with his city and his dream.

I asked him what he thought the city might be like in the year 2000.

“I've no idea,” he said, “but I know this. It will have to be a place designed for people because they will only come to the city if it is beautiful.”

“When you go into the bush, you find old trees rotting on the ground and young trees growing up through them. You find kauris and lancewoods and ferns and orchids. The bush is a living thing.

“What I aim for is a living city. It must have recognizable places so that people feel familiar there and it must be used, not kept like a museum.”

All men are frightened of heights, says Les. People feel happiest on the ground, in the sunshine. The people who have built the concrete and glass towers in downtown Auckland have forgotten this fact.

”Most of the cost of these buildings is in the ground they sit on,” he says. “The rest is all marble saying ‘Look how powerful we are.'

“We could knock down the monuments and leave people standing on the ground, where they are happiest.”

Surely Les Harvey can't be serious when he suggests that all tall buildings in Auckland should be demolished. But he is.

Technology has made mankind redundant as a working animal, he says. A bulldozer does the work of 50 mean and a computer the work of 500.

We have not learnt to make use of this technology for the good of mankind … but when we do there will be no need for giant office buildings full of people in pretend jobs pushing useless pieces of paper at each other,

Les Harvey adds: “It is absurd for us to go on educating people that they must have a good job or position so they can hold up their heads in society. We have to educate people to hold up their heads as people, as the recipients of the fruits of man's endeavours to free mankind from the need for labour.

Work unnecessary
“The whole concept of trying to retain full employment – 40 hours of work every week for everybody – is totally unnecessary.

”But unfortunately we haven't yet found a way to distribute the benefits of technology, because we haven't found anything better than the profit motive.

”In our industrial society, things are made for money, not for love … to give people delight and joy and to make the city a beautiful place where people can come to enjoy their leisure, mixing with people from all over the world and living a full life which is now enjoyed only be extremely wealthy people.

“We have to get back to pride in craftsmanship and arts. Technology has made it possible for everybody to stop working in make-believe jobs and be poets or toymakers, musicians or painters, toffee-makers or dancers.

“We can live life for joy and delight. We can do things for love.”

To show me what he meant, Les Harvey took me round Parnell Village , the little magic toy world he made with love.

He showed me how he created the village by using bits and pieces salvaged from buildings which were being knocked down all over New Zealand . Much of the work he did himself. The rest was done by craftsmen working to his design. Here is a bow window from Dunedin ; there is a carved door from Oamaru; somewhere else is a slab of kauri which used to be the bar of an old country pub. Everywhere there are spiky wood finials from the tops of old buildings.

And every fragment has been restored … no, recreated … into what Les Harvey thinks a city should be like. Everything has been made individually and every part is real. Most of it is old. Les knows the history of each part; he tells about it with love.

This little magic city, he said. Magic? Not the magic of witches and demons, but the magic of delight and wonder and surprise.

Magic? … I said again. Of course, said Les. You see these little blue flowers growing here between the bricks of the path? I just put in the seeds and loved them. They grew and they're lovely. Thousands of people walk along here every week and nobody's stepped on them. That's magic.

And this magnolia tree. It grows just the right shape and the right height for children to climb in, but they can't get high enough to damage the flowers, or fall out and hurt themselves. That's magic.

With pride, Les Harvey showed me some of the other magic he designed into Parnell Village . The paths of antique bricks are very slightly hollowed in the centre so they guide people's feet. And where they come to steps, there's a very slight lip upwards. That's to warn blind people of the danger.

We sat in the sun on one of the seats he has carefully designed to fit people's backsides and I asked Les Harvey what motivated him to begin his crusade to save old Auckland .

It began when Partington's Windmill in Symonds Street was pulled down soon after the Second World War. He was furious. He felt as though a chunk of himself as big as a football had been torn out, as though he had been rejected by someone h loved.

City part of him
“I could see then that some things should never be destroyed because they are part of the city. When some part of the city is destroyed, it is a part of me.”

Les had some money from the sale of a flower farm he owned. He began buying up old buildings. In those days nobody wanted them. Now he has so many he can't remember how many.

I pressed him for an answer. It wasn't important, he said, but if I saw an old building anywhere in Auckland which was really beautiful, it was probably his.

Then I asked him whether his passion for antique buildings had made him wealthy. He told me he didn't know whether he was a millionaire or a pauper. That depended on the state of the market.

“Anyway,” he said, “I know we don't own anything. These may be the last days in which we talk about that extraordinary talisman, money.

“I look on myself as a custodian … and a clown.”

Please explain about clowns, I asked Les Harvey. When he was a boy he saw the great clown Grock … and while the rest of the audience laughed, he cried his eyes out. Ever afterwards he felt he had a tremendous affinity with clowns. At school he made models of clowns out of finials. This was probably the origin of the Les Harvey trademark: finials on all his buildings.

He added: “Now I see this little short fat fellow reflected in shop windows and it's me. I feel like a clown. I understand clowns … understand.”

>>To next Les Harvey story
The Auckland of Les Harvey - NZ Listener, October 4 1977

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