Make music at Peterborough Street’s Sound garden

GAP Filler’s Sound Garden will be officially launched at 100 Peterborough Street Thursday 26th March, 5pm-6pm so come along and create an alternative beat for our city.

BOOM bang buzz, wine wheeze WHOMP, squeak squawk SMACK, clang clatter CRACK these are the sounds of our city! These days the rumbling of mortar grinding and the jangling of steel being dragged from demolished buildings is a constant background noise to our city life’s beat. The lovely people from GAP filler and Greening the Rubble and a pack of volunteers from the neighbourhood including myself from Central Library Peterborough have got together to create Sound Garden 2.0.

On a wet rainy day its was delightful to see so many people turn out and get stuck in to creating something for us to all enjoy. In this case a rubble strewn car park has been transformed into a whimsical palace where you have the opportunity to create music from improvised instruments or just have some fun. It is a great opportunity to bring the kids back into town and explore our new inner city.

Volunteering gives you a warm fuzzy feeling and I got to meet the lovely people from Greening the Rubble and GAP filler who have created so many wonderful transformations and our Amy Mountney the first artist resident of Life in vacant spaces’ microhouse. After heaving our wheelbarrows full of mushroom and arboriculture mulch and getting down and dirty planting our flower beds, I was rewarded with the sense of satisfaction that comes from creating something new and working with a great team.

The Sound Garden is a lovely for a picnic with the kids or you can pick up a coffee and something to eat from the food trucks handily located next door or indulge in a spot of retail therapy at Arts Central which is full of artisan goodies. It is a great opportunity to bring the kids back into town and explore our new inner city you have the opportunity to create music from improvised instruments or just have some fun.

Pop across to Central Peterborough Street Library, pick up the GAP filler mini golf clubs (deposit required) for the GAP filler mini golf course and take the opportunity connect to our free wi-fi and borrow some books we have the biggest range of children’s books or choose from our massive range of magazines and check out our foreign language collection.

Come on you know you want to!

Search our library catalogue for :

• Childrens’ nonfiction books on musical instruments
• Children’s fiction books on music
• Making musical instruments

Our set of Soundgarden images.

Kia ora New Central Library

Kia ora. Take a look at your New Central Library.

Here is some information from today’s media release (Thursday 26 March 2015):

Christchurch City Council today agreed to call for expressions of interest from contractors to build a new library of about 9,850 m2 at a total cost of up to $85 million.

Along with digital, specialist and print collections the Central Library will have a cafe, 200-seat community arena, exhibition space, outdoor terraces, and areas for families, children and youth.

Libraries and Information Manager Carolyn Robertson says the New Central Library facilities and lay out are based on 2,400 ideas from residents collected during last year’s Your Library, Your Voice campaign.

Through clever design we’ll provide the mix of family-friendly areas and quiet places people told us they wanted. The New Central Library will be able to offer programmes that were never possible in our old building. We’ll have activity rooms for things like craft sessions, as well as a film and editing unit and a music studio. I’m looking forward to holding author talks in the community arena.

New Zealand company Architectus worked in partnership  with Danish library experts schmidt hammer lassen (all lower case) and project director Carsten Auer says the design was developed in discussion with Ngāi Tahu and the Ngāi Tūāhuriri rūnanga.

Outdoor terraces and openings on upper floors face culturally significant points in the Canterbury landscape such as Horomaka / Pātaka o Rākaihautū  (Banks Peninsula) and Maungatere (Mt Grey).

The ground floor is a public space that’s an extension of Cathedral Square. We want people to feel like they belong here and, once they’re inside, we want to make access to information as easy as possible.”

• Read the media release.
• Find out more about New Central Library.

Scratch and grab

When I told various people we were thinking of getting a couple of hens they assured me we would love having them. My thoughts were more along the lines of: chooks = garden turned over and manured = eggs. Not ‘chooks – I’ll love having them in our life’.

The first few nights of the fat bottomed girls being in residence in the coop involved our flatmate climbing into the coop, showing the girls where the roosting bar was and physically lifting them into place. A new ramp was made, the f-b girls learnt to motor up it in no time and the flatmate went back to having a life.

We are quite besotted with the big footed raiders already, but due to space restraints we’ve stopped there. Otherwise there would be a couple of pigs grubbing around somewhere as per Antonia Murphy, author of Dirty Chick. She moved to New Zealand from the US, her pipe dream being to have a bit of land, some chickens etc. Things get a bit out of hand and ever so slightly stressful as her stock wander the neighbourhood amongst other things. Let’s say she takes to country life with gusto… I wouldn’t say she calmly bestrides the chaos, but she copes with great humour and I am quite envious of her menagerie.

Alice Walker on the other hand had been raised with chickens for eggs and meat and finding herself living in Mexico realised they were missing from her life. Enter Gertrude Stein, Babe, Glorious, Rufus and Agnes of God, turning her thinking to the interdependence of humans and the chickens. The Chicken Chronicles is more a memoir of a journey.

Meanwhile at Chez Bishi, and I can’t say we weren’t warned, Camilla and Priscilla have been escaping their carefully established playground away from my vegetable gardens and been caught scratching and grabbing with the odd guilty glance over the shoulder and then running away when in danger of being put back in the playground. The kids would never have got away with what these two chicks manage.

Are you thinking of taking on some egg laying devices? Still sitting on the roost perhaps? Afraid you might find yourself clucking round the garden with small feathered friends in tow? Take the plunge: you’ll be in good company.