Queen Street Pocket Park

Chris Chen, Landscape architect for Pocock Design Environment, comments: Liz Davidson Place was identified as one of the key projects that would kick-start and lead the process of a town-centre streetscape upgrade for the township of Blenheim. Once completed it would provide a key public open space within the CBD and would also be used as an event and market space. More importantly, it would set the tone for all future stages of the town-centre streetscape upgrade.After doing a lot of research and testing out different combinations we finally decided to use Horizon Nubrik clay pavers as the main paving material for the park, for clay paving is deeply imbedded in the vernacular of rural New Zealand rural towns. The wide range of available colour selections gave us the ability to create a warm, vibrant and contrasting surface for the otherwise ordinary and often shaded space. The small and uniform-sized pavers also worked well together with larger-format cut stone paving, which added another splash of interests to the space as a whole and tied the paving into other elements in the park (such as planters and furniture). As a result we created a park (and a paving surface) that was fresh looking, easily maintainable and most importantly fitted Blenheim’s rural provincial centre image.