City Mall, Christchurch

The main pedestrian mall in central Christchurch is called City Mall, and it includes two parts of Cashel Street, the Bridge of Remembrance, and a section of High Street. It's sometimes called Cashel Mall. The Bridge of Remembrance was made pedestrian-only in 1976. Then, on January 11, 1982, the main mall was closed to traffic and officially reopened as a pedestrian mall on August 7th of that year. It wasn't until 1992 that the whole mall finally got paved.

This mall was redeveloped between 2006 and 2009, and during that time, they even put in tracks for an expansion of the heritage tram network.

The September 2010 Canterbury earthquake did cause some damage here, but the Boxing Day aftershock, which hit directly under the city, caused even more, including some building failures. The 6.3 magnitude February 2011 Christchurch earthquake really devastated the mall. Many building façades collapsed, and there were several fatalities. The city center was then closed for demolition work. Most of the heritage buildings in the mall that were registered by Heritage New Zealand were among the structures affected.

It's interesting to note that this part of Cashel Street, from Oxford Terrace to Colombo Street, was the very first part of the central city to reopen after the earthquakes. That happened on Saturday, October 29, 2011, with a ceremony led by Prime Minister John Key.

Cashel Street here runs east–west, and the part that makes up City Mall is about 400 meters long. High Street is one of the two diagonal streets in the city center, running from north-west to south-east, and its portion of the mall is about 150 meters long.

The concept of a pedestrian mall here in Cashel and High Streets was first thought of in a 1965 central city redevelopment study. In 1979, the plans for City Mall were confirmed, and then in 1981, a concept design by the City Architect was adopted by the Christchurch City Council and the local business associations. Mayor Hamish Hay opened the NZ$0.5 million City Mall project on August 7, 1982. It took ten years and three separate stages before the entire area was paved, with the final stage, including tree planters and additional seating, completed in the early 1990s. Mayor Vicki Buck opened that third and final stage on December 4, 1992.