The Circle They Tried to Pave Over

This paved area with a few seats is all that is left of the Hack Circle, and

the name itself had to fight for its survival. In 1989 the council built an

amphitheatre here, a small bowl of steps sunk into the new pedestrian mall,

and for a while it was where you went to play hacky sack — hence the name.

Then the hackers moved on, and something else moved in: the emos, the goths,

the heavy metal fans, the kids in black who had nowhere else to sit. By

2004, a city council survey found the Hack Circle was simply where

thirteen-to-eighteen-year-olds went to hang out, smoke, and meet their

friends.

That made people nervous. The police called it a site of criminal activity —

a nineteen-year-old swinging a metal pipe, claims of aggravated robbery,

assault, cannabis dealing. "Ninety per cent of the kids hanging around there

are fine," Sergeant Murry Hurst told The Press. "The other ten per cent

cause the problems." A senior sergeant put it more fairly: you can't move

young people on just because they look different. But a powerful property

owner called the people who gathered there "very scary," and the council

was listening.

In October 2006, the council announced plans to demolish the amphitheatre

and run a slow road through the mall. A student from the nearby Unlimited

school said what everyone suspected: the plan was to remove an "undesirable

youth element." The council denied it. Then it voted seven to six to go

ahead, against overwhelming opposition — four hundred of five hundred and

seventy submissions were against the road. One councillor said the mall had

been captured by young people using it as a "school playground," and The

Press was full of letters about what that sneer said to the kids who had

fronted up to council to make their case.

The young people fought. Food Not Bombs and the Unlimited students gathered

in the circle to "reclaim public space." A protest leader said it plainly:

"The hack circle and the fountain are not great places, but it is all you

have when you have no money. They can't shut us up and just drive us out of

the city." In August 2007, the day demolition of the nearby Stewart Fountain

began, the benefactor Sir Robertson Stewart died that same morning, and

protesters — several arrested — were convinced the timing was no accident.

Demolition of the Hack Circle began in February 2008.

The road never came. In the end the mall was renovated as a pedestrian

mall, and the amphitheatre stayed gone. The paved area with seating that

took its place was quietly renamed by a business manager in 2009 — "the new

Hack Circle," half joke, half admission. Then, in 2025, a sign went up

here, and the name the city spent years trying to bury was made official:

Hack Circle. The circle is flat now, but it has a marker at last — proof

that a place belongs to the people who use it, not the people who own the

property around it.