Mt Albert’s A-listed heritage gun emplacement may soon look less like a hovel where taggers and late-night drinkers come to cause mischief.
The Albert Eden Local Board has stepped up and will tell Auckland Council that it wants to be regarded as a local guardian for the war monument built in the grounds of Chamberlain Park in 1942.
Mt Albert Inc last week revealed the sorry state of the concrete bunker, bringing a strong reaction on the community Facebook page.
Now the board – concerned at the graffiti, weeds and filth at the protected bunker – is looking to take responsibility for keeping it in the shape a war memorial deserves.
The council’s head of operational management, Agnes McCormack, says: “It is regrettable that the historic Chamberlain Park gun emplacement has not been receiving the attention that it deserves as a historic site of significance.”
However, she says, the council’s heritage team is working on a plan to give the site “the appropriate level of maintenance and recognition”, and its importance will be recognised in any development of the park.
Board chair Peter Haynes says the gun emplacement is currently the responsibility of Panuku, a property wing of the council, and he is looking to move it to the local board’s “safekeeping”.
“I feel the board would be a much better custodian of a historic place of this sort, and I think that its neglect under Panuku demonstrates this,” he says. “… In the meantime, we are seeing to it that it gets a careful cleaning.”
Deputy chair Glenda Fryer says “uncovering historic treasures and, in this case, rediscovering them for our residents to reflect on and learn from is always heart-warming”.
The gun emplacement is “an unloved relic which needs to be more loved”, she says, and the board intends to make sure it becomes part of the Chamberlain Park redevelopment.
Bruce Morris
Link to last week’s Mt Albert Inc story
