Kumutoto Stream

You're standing on top of a hidden river. Kumutoto Stream once flowed openly from The Terrace down what is now Woodward Street, across Lambton Quay and into the harbour. It was the heart of early Wellington — Kumutoto Pa, a Maori settlement founded at the stream's mouth by Wi Piti Pomare of Ngati Mutunga in eighteen twenty-four, was one of the first communities in what would become the city.

The stream was culverted and buried in eighteen sixty-six — the first stream in Wellington to be put underground. But it's still running beneath the concrete. After heavy rain, you can sometimes hear water through the storm drains. The city was built on top of its rivers, not instead of them.

In the Woodward Street pedestrian subway, artist Kedron Parker's sound installation plays the sounds of trickling water and native birdsong, imagining the area before concrete took over. It became the first permanent media-based artwork in Wellington's public art collection. If you walk through the subway, stop and listen. The river is speaking.

This is one of at least a dozen buried streams under central Wellington. Te Aro Stream, which once ran through the suburb of Te Aro, is another. The city systematically buried its waterways during the nineteenth century, turning them into storm drains. Today there's a growing movement to daylight some of these streams — to bring them back to the surface. Whether that happens remains to be seen, but the streams themselves aren't going anywhere. They've been here far longer than the buildings above them.