Bill Mackay

But occasionally, as you walk down Queen Street, you can see it is dug up occasionally as new connections are made and that sort of thing.

And coming from the field of architecture, I have a very acute nose when it comes to the smell of sewage.

It's all piped over.

Occasionally when they're digging up, you can see chunks of the very old work.

So vaulted brick work around it, you know, old school kind of sewer.

Yeah, many people often talk about daylighting it, but it's not a river, it's a stream.

But it was a significant stream and I wouldn't mind daylighting it and bringing it back again and getting some flora and fauna around it as well.

It was a great food source and I was just reading the other day of a very early site in Queen Street where two eras of Māori were living and they were gardening there.

There were middens there showing what they were catching from further down at the beach and what they were getting out of the wetland here, eels, that sort of thing.

Yeah, major.

It's happening quite a lot in Auckland because Auckland, with the topography in Auckland being lots of hills and valleys,

We had a lot of streams and thousands of them have been piped.

But there's a big move these days when the Waterview Tunnel was done, a lot of the Oakley Creek upstream was daylighted as well.

So you can get, you put flora and fauna back there, you get the habitat back, we get the freshwater fish, we get the birds, you know, we get everything.

It's a great idea.

Not all of it because it tends to be over on one side of Queen Street, the western side of it.

Yeah, there is still a tunnel under Merrill Drive that goes from the carpark of the Grand Millennium Hotel through to the Aotea Centre.

And I last walked through that probably about six or seven years ago, but students tell me it's closed off now, unfortunately.

It's just like a subterranean tunnel under a road designed for pedestrians, but they've just closed it off.

Yeah, if there was public pressure.