Canterbury College Campus Moves, Leaving Arts Centre Site

Do you ever wonder what used to be here? Because for over a hundred years, right on this spot at the Arts Centre in Christchurch, a telescope looked up at the sky. It was the Townsend telescope.

Then the earthquake hit in 2011. And a photo taken in the days after shows astronomy professor Karen Pollard looking into a pile of jagged steel, wooden planks, and crumbled stone. The scaffolding was "munched," she recalled, and the observatory dome was completely flattened and in pieces. But her main interest wasn't the dome itself, it was what had been inside for more than a century. She said they looked through as much of the rubble as they could, but it didn’t seem to be anywhere. The big question became: where is the telescope?

This all started a long time ago. The Townsend Teece telescope was made in England in 1864 and came to New Zealand in the late 1800s to observe the transit of Venus in 1882. It belonged to a local astronomer, James Townsend, who later donated it to Canterbury College when he retired. The Christchurch Astronomical Society gathered £420 to build an observatory tower here on campus. The plan was to open it to the public, which they did in 1896 for stargazing sessions.

At the time, the Canterbury College campus was here, but it later moved to Ilam, leaving this site as what we now know as the Arts Centre. An article from The Star in 1899 describes a journalist looking through the Townsend at the Kappa Crucis "Jewel Box" cluster. They wrote that through the telescope, it looked like brilliant sapphires and rubies, with diamonds, had been scattered across the view. The journalist added that you learn something about the movements of heavenly bodies and the depths of the universe.