The Auckland of Les Harvey
By Peter Cape, NZ Listener, October 4 1977

Les Harvey is a man with a positive attitude towards life. To him, the important quality is “magic” (“magic” and “light” are the two terms which occur most often in his conversation).

Cities, Harvey claims, are for people, and they must be maintained on a scale suitable for people to live in. They must also contain something to remind the inhabitants of their humanity. The best reminders, he feels, are those of a past when people were human-sized and loved and laughed and worked and sweated.

This is the grassroots philosophy behind his continual purchasing of run-down Victorian and early 20 th century properties in Auckland . He bought a one-time foundry from under the blades of the bulldozers and is slowly renovating it. We stood three floors down and looked at the rough tunnel through which air had been forced to drive the foundry's furnace. He pointed to the rammed earth hard as rock and said, “The original foundry's probably another 12 feet below this, but they added to it and altered it – without the help of any engineer or architect – and it's beautiful. Really beautiful.”

One has to admit that it is. The rough bricks (“No bricklayer laid these. They were put in by labourers at so much a hundred, and they didn't care how they went in so long as they stood up”), the still visible, bricked up arches, the strange gaps and apertures (“With each one you're got to make up your mind whether to leave or to fill it in”) and above all the pillars, each different, each fantastically unprofessional. Harvey patted one and said, “Look at this; it's pure Assyrian.” I started to ask the obvious question, but before I'd said more than a half a dozen words he interrupted, “What the hell am I going to use it for? I don't know.”

But he has ideas. The top floor is already let to an electronics firm. On a lower floor, the ceiling of which moves in a variety of planes to catch and reflect the light like the bevelled sills of the iron-framed windows, there will be an advertising agency. He hopes that, as creative people, the agency executives will appreciate the pillars and the windows.(“I've tried to get under the skin of the people who installed them. I've painted them with tarry old paint and a rough brush, trying to put myself in the shoes of the foundry worker, who painted them in the first place.”) Only in one place has he compromised. One window is not iron, and opens. He pointed to an ancient battle-scarred poplar outside. “That's probably the father of most of the poplars in Auckland . I've made the window to open so you can hear the leaves rustling in spring.”

For the rest of the building, part of it a storage place for old cartwheels (“I'm going to build a caravan on that”), fireplaces, kerosene stoves, iron railings from Lyttelton, he has dreams rather than plans. “I'd like to make this a coffee lounge, with cushions so you could relax on the floor. And those stairs, see how they're made for sitting on. They're part of the kindly quality of life.” Below again he would have a huge fireplace, a wine-cellar, sawdust on the floor.

Even though it's unfinished, the foundry is already a place for people. They come to watch the light die on the white painted walls, light candles, talk, and sing. “Sometimes,” Harvey says, “it's like a cathedral.” The whole of the foundry, though, is something more than a restoration. It's a deliberate bringing of the past into the present and making it live again in terms of the present: not merely as a museum. An enormous kauri pillar, once a horizontal beam in the old Shortland Street Post Office, is now a piece of vertical sculpture in the stairwell, still in one sense itself and yet in another something very different.

The pillar is a symbol of many of Harvey 's restorations; like the tiny, brick-built Cornish-style cottage in Herne Bay . It was built early in the 19 th century for a Captain Williams, a “Port-Master”. This tile floored, narrow-staircased building has been restored by Harvey with old wood-roller-printed wallpaper in a post-William Morris design of daffodils and leaves, with a chipping away of later plaster from the earlier rough-pointed brick and with the regeneration of some early art nouveau stencil-decorated built-in furniture. It has one thing in common with all the other houses in the city which he has bought and restored. “I may put little people in little houses and tall people in tall houses, but all my tenants are lovely people in lovely houses.”

He has found lovely people, too, for his development of Parnell. This project started literally by accident (though the accident was someone else's rather than his own). He was working on a new building on a site on Parnell Rise when someone called his attention to an incident on the road below. From there he looked across to the roofline of the old decayed factories and shops opposite and recognised their beauty – and above all the need to save them. He bought as many as he could, and after years of work has developed them into shops and boutiques unique in New Zealand . Alongside them, much to Harvey 's delight, other buildings are deliberately taking on the same architectural qualities. The other thing that pleases him is that most of the people who have leased space in his buildings are not merely sellers of goods but specialists in their particular products. Consequently there has developed the kind of craftsmanship in the area which some newspapers, perhaps not entirely misguidedly, have equated with London 's Chelsea.

Not everything has gone smoothly. At the top of the Rise Harvey owns a complex of old houses surrounded by magnolia and apple trees. It is his ambition to turn this into the kind of environment where people can shop, drink coffee and wine under grapevines and bougainvillea and relax away from the city and the traffic which makes its way noisily up the hill.

In the development of this he has been fighting a long-term battle with the city council, which for a variety of reasons has found itself unable to give its approval for a concept which although conceived of in terms of people and the preservation of their environment is nevertheless too far removed from the idea of “progressive” urban development. On this idea of progress Harvey has some not entirely orthodox views. “I'm told I'm supposed to progress,” he says. “So I ask, what's progress?”

The answer isn't as simple as it seems. Is progress simply a matter of fitting people into custom-built concrete boxes (and leaving most of the open space outside for cars)? Or is it a matter of creating complete environments for people and everything else which goes with them? Is it a matter – to take an extreme example – of bulldozing hundreds of acres of landscape flat and building on it a completely heat-controlled, air-controlled, earthquake- and socially controlled concrete envelope, or is it a matter of consciously selecting areas for development and areas for preservation? Harvey believes that it's the latter, but he's also afraid that, for Auckland at least, it may be too late. The motorway has already destroyed Grafton Gully and is now chewing its way through Newton . Real estate organisations are more concerned with buying and rebuilding than with buying and retaining. Harvey realises that while he can buy and restore individual houses throughout the city these by themselves count for a little when “progressive” development is taking place. It is only when he can retain a whole street or a block that he has any chance of permanently preserving part of Victorian Auckland.

Few of us, Harvey believes, really know ourselves as well as we should (“Man knows nothing of himself; he could be either an animal or a demigod”), and he believes we're much more concerned with justifying ourselves to ourselves than we are with explaining what we really are to other people. We tamper with the vital environments where we live because it is fashionable to do so, forgetting that our humanity derives as much from our links with the past as it does from our links with the present. We even lose touch with natural things (there's greater significance than I realised at the time in Harvey's love of the mosses which grow in the cracks in the asphalt, in his vines and bougainvillea on industrial walls, and in his concern that the city council should not poison the self-sown wattles in the wasteland beside his foundry – to say nothing of the fact that he preserves his own olives and makes his own wine.)

It may well be as Harvey puts it with his use of the word “magical” to describe unappreciated areas of our lives (“See the quality of that light, it's magical”) and “beautiful” to describe parts of our environment which conventionally we would regard as anything but (of his foundry, “So much beauty; so much beauty”). We do in fact live far better and more wonderfully than we realise. The trouble is that we can destroy both the magic and the beauty by being deliberately ignorant or unaware of either. We seem able to achieve this destruction most simply and most efficiently by treating our personal, and particularly our historical, past as something which can easily be cast off or forgotten – by accepting simply because it is more grandiose than we are, a contemporary scale of living which belittles and denigrates us and which will reduce us in time to the anonymous and tasteless contents of a concrete passage.

For Harvey the human scale is the most simple and basic of the lot. When I plan I think of a comfortable, simple, three-legged stool. Space for one person to sit, and elbow room for him to wave his arms about if he wants to. Then I let it develop into the ideas of spaces, rooms, environments; but in fact the sort of thing which starts me off is where we walk or sit, or lie.”

Harvey 's original interests were in design, the graphic arts and model-making. When he was asked in the post-depression years if he could make a sleeping doll for the daughter of a friend, he did exactly what he was asked. The long-term result was a development of toymaking, followed by a diversity of productive activity.

In those harder times housewives wanted designs for “fancywork”. Harvey experimented and found a formula for the wax, and then went on and produced the transfer designs as well. Other people asked for heavy, unobtainable paper for wedding invitations. Harvey , with a couple of old bathtubs and a horsehair sieve, provided some of Auckland 's first handlaid paper.

Les Harvey is a man of enormous enthusiasm and wry self-knowledge (I've got the greatest collection of old bricks in the world”). I have a feeling that what he is demonstrating is something which can't necessarily be said by the Town Planners or even the architects, but which needs to be said by every human being: that cities are for people, and that what cities need is a continuously developing amalgam of the past and the present. In this, in spite of the fact that he feels that he is fighting a losing battle and that he feels he might well be one of the biggest cranks in the 20 th century. Les Harvey is prepared to keep battling on. Many of us could afford to learn from him.

>>To next Les Harvey story
His passion - preserving - NZWW, July 19 1982

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