When Gisborne Believed the Town Centre Was the Future
- Jul 5
- 4 min read
Treble Court Shopping Centre
25 Peel Street, Gisborne 4010.
There was a time when Gisborne believed deeply in the future.
Not in the abstract modern sense where people post motivational quotes beside productivity podcasts while ordering storage containers online.
A more physical future.
Concrete.
Fountains.
Pedestrian plazas.
Civic optimism.
You can still see traces of it around town if you know where to look.
Treble Court, built in 1986 is one of them.
For many locals, the fountain outside Treble Court sits somewhere between memory, landmark and strange civic relic.
Children climbed around it.
Teenagers gathered beside it.
People used it as a meeting point back when “meeting somebody in town” was still a completely normal sentence.
And like many parts of old Gisborne, it reflects a period when planners, councils and developers genuinely believed the future of the city would happen in the CBD itself.
Not online.
Not inside giant malls.
Not delivered by courier.
Right there in town.
The Era of Civic Optimism
From roughly the 1960s through the 1980s, many New Zealand towns entered a period of civic modernisation.
Gisborne was no exception.
There was enormous confidence in:
pedestrian shopping areas
modern retail precincts
public plazas
fountains
public art
civic gathering spaces
concrete architecture that at the time probably looked spectacularly futuristic
The logic made sense.
People shopped in town.
Worked in town.
Banked in town.
Met friends in town.
Teenagers wandered town aimlessly on Friday nights for reasons nobody fully understood but everyone accepted.
The CBD was expected to remain the social and commercial centre of urban life indefinitely.
And so places like Treble Court emerged from that mindset.
Not merely as retail developments, but as statements of confidence.
The Strange Beauty of Old Plazas
Looking back now, there’s something oddly charming about the urban design optimism of that era.
The fountains.
The tiled seating areas.
The planters.
The pedestrian zones.
The ambition.
Today, some people see these spaces as dated.
But they were built during a time when councils still believed public spaces mattered enough to invest in aesthetically.
The Treble Court fountain was not technically necessary.
That was precisely the point.
It existed because cities once believed people should gather somewhere pleasant even when no direct commercial transaction was occurring.
Modern urban economics struggles badly with this concept.
Gisborne Never Built the Big Mall
One of the more interesting things about Gisborne is what the city never became.
Unlike many New Zealand centres, Gisborne never developed a dominant enclosed shopping mall that consumed the entire retail culture of the CBD.
And strangely enough, that may have preserved part of the city’s personality.
Gisborne still largely operates as a classic provincial New Zealand main-road shopping city with independent stores, cafés, bookstores, surf shops, people wandering between businesses and locals becoming mildly irritated if they cannot find a park directly outside the shop they intend to visit.
Which, to be fair, happens only occasionally.
This is still a city where many people consider walking more than forty metres from their car a minor civic inconvenience.
And honestly, there’s something almost charming about that.
The Big-Box Irony
Ironically, Gisborne does have a large-format retail precinct.
The Warehouse, OfficeMax and Noel Leeming all sit together near the CBD.
But unlike many cities where these developments were pushed to distant outskirts beside motorways and giant parking deserts, Gisborne placed its national-chain big-box retail on valuable riverfront land close to the town centre itself.
Which in retrospect feels both slightly bizarre and deeply Gisborne.
In another city, that riverfront might have become luxury waterfront dining or expensive mixed-use urban redevelopment.
In Gisborne, it became:
discounted kettles
printer cartridges
televisions
back-to-school stationery
outdoor beanbags
mildly aggressive weekend parking manoeuvres
And somehow, the city still retained enough personality around it to stop the CBD becoming completely hollowed out.
That is actually harder to achieve than many people realise.
When “Going Into Town” Meant Something
Younger generations may not fully appreciate how central town once felt to everyday life.
“Going into town” used to be an event.
You dressed slightly better.
You expected to see people you knew.
You wandered.
Browsed.
Stopped for coffee.
Visited bookstores.
Looked through department stores.
Ran into half the population accidentally.
Entire social ecosystems existed inside town centres.
And Gisborne’s compact scale made this feel even stronger.
The city still had enough density to feel social without becoming overwhelming.
Then the World Changed
Gradually, the forces reshaping town centres everywhere arrived in Gisborne too.
Online shopping.
Big-box retail.
Chain stores.
Changing work patterns.
The slow collapse of department stores.
The internet quietly dismantling entire retail industries while everyone argued about parking.
Suddenly the old planning assumptions no longer worked.
Pedestrian plazas designed for heavy foot traffic became quieter.
Public fountains looked less futuristic and more nostalgic.
Some civic spaces lost their confidence.
And yet Gisborne avoided complete collapse better than many comparable provincial centres.
Why?
Because the city retained character.
Gisborne Never Fully Became Generic
This may be the most important part of the story.
Many towns gradually flattened themselves into commercial sameness:
chain stores, bypass retail, giant malls and CBDs emptied of personality.
Gisborne resisted some of that.
Not perfectly.
But noticeably.
Independent cafés survived.
Bookshops survived.
Surf culture remained tied to the centre of town.
Creative businesses stayed.
People still browse slowly here.
The city retained enough identity to stop the CBD becoming emotionally interchangeable with everywhere else.
That matters enormously.
Because once personality disappears from a town centre, it is extremely difficult to rebuild.
The Fountain Still Means Something
Old fountains are interesting things.
Objectively, they are simply water moving around concrete.
Emotionally, they become memory containers.
People remember:
sitting beside them
meeting friends there
eating lunch nearby
hearing the water
being children around them
Friday nights in town
summer afternoons
wandering without purpose
Treble Court’s fountain belongs to that category now.
A surviving fragment from a time when Gisborne genuinely believed the town centre itself was the future.
And strangely enough, perhaps that optimism was not entirely misplaced.
Because despite everything that changed, people still want the same things:
connection, atmosphere, public life, somewhere with character.
The modern world keeps trying to replace those experiences digitally.
So far, it hasn’t succeeded in Gisborne.
