Fletcher Residential have lodged two plan changes with the council to develop the Three Kings Quarry.
Fletcher Residential has lodged two private plan change applications with Auckland Council for the redevelopment of Three Kings Quarry. These applications outline two ways to transform the area into a new urban precinct.
The quarry is located at the southern end of Mt Eden Road, eight kilometres from Auckland’s central business district. New links will be created to connect the development’s housing precincts with Three Kings town centre and the volcanic cone
Te Tatua a Riukiuta Maunga (Big King).The Three Kings development promotes housing diversity with a range of high quality dwellings including two-to-three storey terrace homes, three-to-four storey apartments and 10-storey cascading apartments set against the quarry slope.
Fletcher Residential’s preferred plan change application involves exchanging land to better utilise surrounding Crown land. This will create significant recreational space with two sports fields, a Town Square connecting the precinct to the Three Kings town centre, a convention centre and the historic Three Kings Oval.
The second plan change appears to be a backup should they not be able to exchange land and contains the same residential development however they say it has less extensive community spaces and sports fields than the preferred proposal.
Below is the location of the Quarry along Mt Eden Rd and what it looks like at the moment. At its deepest it is over 3o below the level of Mt Eden Rd.
Fletcher’s estimate their plans will deliver 1,200-1,500 dwellings which would equate to 2,500 to 3,500 extra residents. They’ve also launched a site for the development showing some concept images of what it would be look like. Below are some of those along with how they describe the development (so warning marketing speak).
A clear view ahead
Urban design has been carefully considered to incorporate multiple vistas of Te Tatua-a-Riukiuta / Big King. Street level views and improved access will restore Te Tatua-a-Riukiuta / Big King’s position as a key feature of Auckland, and by doing so give the site a strong sense of location and connection with the wider city.
One of a family
Designated viewing areas will let residents greet the morning or usher out the evening with views to Maungakiekie (One Tree Hill) to the east and Maungawhau (Mt Eden) to the north.
1. Regenerated native bush will extend Big King’s footprint for greater connection between neighbourhood and nature.
2. Enhanced pathways will be created to open up Big King for recreational access.
3. Key sightlines to Big King as well as to neighbouring volcanic cones will be preserved.
Around the edge of the quarry are meant to be a series of cascading apartments up to 10 storeys high against the Quarry wall. I would certainly hope there’s publicly accessible lifts to help provide good connectivity between the development and the road. It also seems odd to me that the housing would go in the northern part which would likely to be the most shaded part while the sports fields would be in the south which is also the area closes to the town centre.
Fresh air living
Interconnected open spaces encourage outdoor activities – both relaxed and active. Two new sand-carpeted sports fields connected to the Big King Reserve will be created for year-round activity, and significant areas of passive open space will be provided for relaxation and reflection.
Human scale
Pedestrian trails, boardwalks, ramps, stairways and a proposed elevated walkway to Te Tatua-a-Riukiuta / Big King enable exploration by foot and reduce the need for motorised transport throughout the area.
A natural fit
Stepped apartments will cascade down the quarry slopes to both transform and complement the existing landscape. Living spaces are to the front, with car parking hidden behind, preserving front door access to parkland and walkways.
1. 7.5 hectares of high-quality open spaces enable a wide variety of recreational activities.
2. Key pedestrian linkages will be provided to and through the site.
3. Contemporary urban design provides for an active interface between residences and park spaces.
Viva variety
A diverse mix of people and cultures will come together to create an integrated urban community. With residences on the doorstep of a thriving town centre, meeting and mingling will be a part of daily life.
A vibrant heart
Residents and visitors alike will find plenty to see and do in the town square – a vibrant gathering place that puts people at the centre, and draws on the energy of the surrounding retail, recreational and residential areas.
Home for all
A blend of retirees, young families, solo dwellers and working professionals living side-by-side. With a balanced mix of terrace houses and apartments, the new area will cater to a wide range of lifestyles and life stages.
1. When completed, 1200—1500 dwellings will become home to 2500—3500 people.
2. Located just 6.5 km from the heart of Auckland, the area will attract a diverse mix of cultures and lifestyles.
3. An activated town square will foster a lively retail scene.
Multiple connections
Situated in the heart of an already thriving suburb, the proposed development offers access to nearby amenities that make life easy: Three Kings School, a major supermarket, shops and services, and public transport.
Out and about
Shows, live music, book readings, community classes and more are just a short walk away at the Fickling Centre and the Mount Roskill Library. Special care will be taken to ensure the new site is closely linked to these popular civic facilities.
A sense of flow
Movement of people is a key element of community. With a series of walkways, stairs and potentially a public lift, the town square is designed to connect the existing suburb to amenities and open spaces within the development.
1. Opening up space for shared and public use is a key component of the overall design.
2. A ‘village within a city’ will be created by integrating retail, recreational and residential spaces.
3. Residents will be able to make use of existing amenities in the surrounding area.
I know some in the community aren’t happy about the proposal as they were keen to see the giant hole filled in before being developed while I also understand the local board are keen for the local community to have more say on the shape of the development so I’m sure there will be a lot more discussion from them over the coming weeks and months.
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Another Stonefields. Cut off from its surrounding area and inevitably car dependent because of that.
How disappointing.
I agree that aspects of the design leaves something to be desired.
However, it’s all within good walking distance of a frequent bus route along Mt Eden Road, and another proposed frequent bus route along Mt Albert Rd, which makes a big difference. No need for buses to route in and out of a dead end development like Stonefields.
Also it seems that all the dwellings are medium density (some would call the apartments high density but they’re not really). No stand alone McMansions like Stonefields.
I think though the the interface with the current shopping centre and Mt Eden Road is crucial – currently it looks like there are at least a couple of pedestrian pathways to Mt Eden Road which is good.
Not so good walking distance to transport as mt eden and dom rd involve a 30m climb to get out of the hole. I expect most will drive.
What is pedestrian access like oyt of the mt wellington quary?
People were keen to see the “giant hole filled in” ? Really? Are there people really that stupid that exist in this world?
Why is it stupid to want the hole filled in? There is good money in providing a place to tip building waste and the resulting land would be a much nicer place to live than somewhere which never sees the sun.
“The locals” fought hard to prevent it from being filled, because that takes truck traffic, and they weren’t having that (but they lost the fight on that one a few years ago). So there is a consent that allows filling.
I can hardly believe that I am seriously being asked to provide a reply – thought it would have been so obvious that it wouldn’t need one. Anyway, here goes.
A hole that has been in operation for the last 30 plus years, removing densely packed rock layer by layer, truckload by truckload, carefully quarried out, millions and millions of cubic meters of high quality rock, slowly hauled out by giant diesel engines. Huge amounts of expense and use of fuel and trucks and time to get all the rock out.
Now think about what it would be like to have to reverse that. Every single truckload taken out, would have to be replaced by a truckload brought back in again. Every cubic meter of rock taken out of the hole in the ground, replaced by another cubic meter of hard fill going back into the ground. Thirty years of excavation to dig it out: how long to fill it back in again? It wouldn’t be unreasonable to say: another thirty years to fill it in again….
Only this time, it wouldn’t be so solid as a sub-base. Every spoonful would need to be compacted down, to be steamrollered into shape, 100mm layers at a anime, carefully compacted so as to avoid settlement later. So it might even take longer to fill it in, than it took to cart it away. And then there is another thing to think about…
Where would you get the rock to fill it in from? Is there a nearby mountain that needs shoveling into a pit, just sitting carefree, unused, unwanted, available for purchase, to take away, truckload by truckload…? Or would you have to dig a hole in the ground, to create a quarry, to dig out the soil from one spot, just so that you could truck it over to another spot, and fill in the other hole? Because I’m sure that may not make much economic sense, to dig a new quarry to fill in an existing quarry…. Or provide a dump, full of rotting material that subsides over the years, full of noxious toxins, as a base for your new home…
Winstone have a consent to fill the hole. It would take many years, and the locals opposed it due to truck volumes. Some googling will find you the relevant reports. Search for Winstone and Three Kings and filling.
Maximus convinced me. Are the land values so high that they could easily absorb the marginal costs of filling the hole? And the cost of filling that hole would be high, not to mention the value of money over the time it takes to fill it. There seems to be an understanding that developing the site without filling the hole is a live option. If so, someone needs a psychiatrist now. That’s something you just don’t do. What would they fill it with? They can’t use urban household waste because of subsidence and methane issues. That may leave the CRL. Is it known how much volume of spoil will be excavated, and how much is needed for this site? And when will the CRL be built? Further, why put so many resources into this site when there are many better sites to develop much more cheaply and with less air quality and ghg impact, which tens of thousands of very large heavy trucks would have. And, over the course of years of filling, the development plan (and economy) is going to change many times, the owners and financiers will change over time so nothing in these pretty pictures is at all real. Fletchers may just be getting it ready to sell, anyway; they need the pretty pictures to get their RC. Trust no one.
Some holes just don’t need to be filled in.
A more viable idea is to fill it with water. (What with sea level rise, no one will miss it.) Turn it into a water skiing, jet skiing, scuba training, sailing and rowing club, naval maneuvers facility. And it could be used as cooling water for NZ’s first nuclear power plant. Even better, use it to grow new coral reefs to replace the ones that are dying.
The Company is currentlymaking as much money from filling the site as they made from digging the hole in the first place. Roughly, at current charging per cubic metre, they will generate about $100 million from filling the hole should their development actions actually be in line with their prior undertakings and their EIA and resource consent-which is not currently the case.
Even mining companies these days rehabilitate a site at the end of their operations. This is an open caste mine in the middle of town!
The Fletcher operation has blighted the Three Kings area for about 75 years. Its therefore not unresonable for the community to expect something better than a 15 metre deep hole in the ground.
And by the way, their propsed playing fields have more to do with the need to cope with 100year design storms filling a 15 metre hole than they have with community benefit and reserve land utilisation.
Why on earth(sic) aren’t they putting the Waterview spoil in there?
Too late. Waterview is going to fill in the Wiri Quarry. CRL spoil though…
It looks nothing like Stonefields.
That said I wouldn’t want to live 30m below road level.
Another convention centre? Really?
There is another side to this story….
Since last year Local Board had already been working with residents, Fletchers, & the shopping centre owners (& I presume local iwi) to come up with a plan for the whole Three Kings precinct. Fletchers attended those meetings with the locals. The final outcome will probably involve swapping of land or facilities to get the best result. Partway through those consultations, Fletchers presented their own concept sketches out of left field at an open day at the Fickling Centre. Residents who had not attended the Board run meetings assumed these were sanctioned by Auckland Council, but they were nothing to do with that consultation.
At the next meeting with the board, locals took Fletchers to task over a lack of faith with the community going off on their own plan, and accused the board of token consultation. The board was adamant it was nothing to do with them, and Fletchers was completely unrepentant. However, that was the first meeting where the shopping centre owners turned up and gave a quick overview of what they would like to do, which received a round of applause from locals.
Three Kings could be one of the best developments in Auckland in terms of civic, shopping, sports and recreation facilities, variety of housing stock available, people centric sized solutions that don’t require a car for every day life. But we need Fletchers to play ball with the other stakeholders. Fletchers want council land to go ahead with their plan, and council want Fletchers land to go ahead with their plan sanctioned by locals – so at the moment we’re a bit stuffed until they start talking
Having been to Stonefields, I say ‘fill it’.
Abandoned quarries are prone to flooding, as any developer knows. Good luck all who live there.
Have every one forgotten that to quarry to its present depth Winstons (Fletchers) have been pumping huge quantities of water out of this big hole, up to their pump house (The house on Mt Eden Rd) then to the Manukau Harbour.. They are at present drilling a large pipe beside this house,
. Does this mean that Fletchers will have to keep on pumping out water to build their housing plan ? Maybe this is cheaper than refilling first (Fill will be available from downtown railway tunnel )
And who will pay to run the pumps after Fletchers have finished building houses?
Easy enough to cover in an agreement – either the body corporate for the apartments / houses (if there is one) has to pay for them, or it’s done via a targeted rate. Or the owners pay a lump sump to Council that, say, is enough to cover the pumping costs for the next 100 years (pumps are there, are proven technology – so it should be pretty easy to forecast running cost and replacement costs). The flooding is a fair point, but by no means an insurmountable one.
You wouldn’t need to get the houses above the water table?
I also heard that Fletchers have blithely helped themselves to public land in their proposal. My view is unless you can fill it in, that hole is useless for residential development. I know that given land values in the area the temptation to try and capitalise it is enormous, but lets not build houses there just because of greed. I mean, building houses in a 30m deep hole? Have people taken leave of their senses? Why not just turn it into a recreational lake?
Because that would mean they (private company) would gift Auckland Council land valued in the dozens of millions? We live in capitalism, that’s not how it works.
And houses in a “hole” will work okay if the transport links are fine, and shading & water tables have been considered. I strongly expect they would.
“I also heard that Fletchers have blithely helped themselves to public land in their proposal.”
Didn’t the post say that it was a land swap, and also that the public land would help get more reserves development? And that if Council doesn’t want that trade, there’s one that sticks to their land? I certainly have heard a few things that imply they haven’t been very diplomatic in how they went about it, but their proposal doesn’t sound like “helping themselves” (implied unethical action) to land they don’t own…
It would be nice to see this land developed at a suitably denser level (higher than what is proposed) but I am concerned that the public transport links and roads are not up to it. It would be nice to see the Dominion Road Tram line done with a link to the other side of the site. Filling the site would make sense using CRL clean fill. This will delay development but as per the Wiri Quarry it will not take that long but will need to settle before development could start.
You have to consider though – using CRL fill would doom this to sit around doing nothing for at least 10 years (some years before CRL digging even starts – IF it starts anytime soon – then some years for filling (the original consent for the filling stated 3-5 years I believe), then some years to build houses). Only then will the owners reap any rewards. Are you prepared to pay the owners the money they lose in the interim by not developing – from our rates? And what about the much-needed houses that we won’t have for another decade?
Nobody is saying that the site should not be rehabilitated, But it needs to be filled to match the undertakings given by the company when they received a consent from the Environment Court. It used to be that once the Court had deliberated and decided upon a matter, then all parties complied with the decision. Note how the glossy plans dont show any contour lines.
It now seems that if one is big enough one can simply ignore decisions of the Court. Corporate agorance, so it seems has no bounds! They dug ; they should fill and rehabilitate the site. And yes, large infrastructure projects already underway can provide the fill and that would make economic sense for the city and the community, not just the site owners.
“But it needs to be filled to match the undertakings given by the company when they received a consent from the Environment Court. It used to be that once the Court had deliberated and decided upon a matter, then all parties complied with the decision”
A rather gross misrepresentation of law. When you get a permit to build a house, that doesn’t force you to build a house, it gives you permission should you want to carry through. It’s not in the slightest unethical (if potentially frustrating to your neighbours) if you then decide to not build a house, and instead apply for permission to build an office instead. Same here. A consent to fill is not a requirement to fill. It’s a permission to fill.
Yes, but when one builds a house there are a set of plans and a resource consent is sometimes required as well.it is an approval linked to a plan and your undertakings to follow that plan once you commence building.
One can not build a totally different house under that approval if it does not match the plans. So the analogy is entirely spurious and mis-informed
.
I suggest that Loraxus does some initial homework and reads the Environment Court decsion before commenting further. The permission to fill had many conditions, amongst them being well defined consultation requirements and an approved (almost) final contour linked to Plan 002 of Harrison and Grierson.
The analogy you are using is faulty. By your argument, they could choose whether or not to have used it as a quarry. Having used it as a quarry they are then legally obligated to abide by the conditions of doing so, such as filling it in if that was a condition.
The discussions now dominating the 3 kings Quarry seem to have degenerated into points of order re the interpretations of legal points of order.If has happened so
me years ago , a Major power disruption should occur, then what guarantee is there thst the Fletcher redevelopement
will not result in major flooding and submerging of the residention properties constructed in the quarry hole ?
It would be obviuos that prior filling would be the most sensable avtikn…unless you had an a commercial advantage accuring to your companry or your self.
Well Stonefields is another former Fletcher Quarry, its deeper and in the same, if not worse flood prone position, and it needs 24×7 pumping to keep the 3 “lakes” in it from flooding during any rain.
The flood management plan for flooding presented by Stonefields to the Environment court consisted of pumping the water out, when and if the pumps (and/or also power) failed, they would have 48 hours before their expert witnesses stated the first homes flooded in the worst case scenario considered to be “a 1 in 50 year event” (so-called 2% Annual Event Probability) – and if I recall Auckland has had a lot of those sorts of “1 in 50/100 years” type rain events in the last decade or so, and no doubt they will become more frequent in the future too, due to climate change induced weather pattern instability.
After 48 hours of no pumping, the residents will be flooded out progressively from South to North, but of course, before the flooding starts affecting the houses, the pumping station itself will be well submerged – so the likelihood is once the waters rise to flood the pumping station, then the entire quarry will flood.
Those on the Northern slopes (near to College Road) will be the last to be impacted, But it will be small comfort to everyone to know that I’m sure.
And once that pumping station is flooded it will take a long, long, time to pump the water level back down to restore “normal” living conditions – not least as the water is discharged through the neighbouring Waiatarua (formerly Lake St John) reserve, to flow out the sea via the Orakei Basin, and there is a limited drainage capacity of that drainage system to cope with the level of sustained discharge you’d need to pump out a partially flooded quarry.
And that part of Auckland is a major water catchment area/i.e. its a “drain” for the entire area, so its not just the rain falling in the quarry that it has to manage, but the many square km of the surrounding area as well.
I am sure that 3 Kings Quarry will suffer the same drainage and pumping out problems and the same fate eventually.
I don’t doubt your information, but just as a note of comparison to point out that sites can safely rely on pumping: many of the suburbs of Napier are below high tide level, having been built on land raised after the 1931 quake. Marewa, Maraenui, etc, all rely on pumps kicking in to keep them above water. Those pumps have only failed once in the last 50 odd years…. The pumps are, of course, designed to be fully submersible.
And another point, for those advocating that it be turned into a lake – what was the rock product that 3 Kings was mining? Wasn’t it mainly scoria? And isn’t scoria a hugely porous type of igneous lava? Not so good at holding water – but good at free draining…. Just saying.
If it’s below the water table, where is the water going to drain? Rather than worrying that the scoria won’t hold the water in, i think the problem is the scoria won’t hold the water out!
Consultation closes today.
New Orleans relied on pumping.
And… when you talk about the length of time taken to extract the rocks from the quarry, aren’t we talking about a commercial rate? I doubt they were extracting the material as quickly as they could because to do so would reduce the price they got for it and reduce the length of time they could milk those higher prices. I don’t imagine it would take thirty years to fill back up.
Maybe the Three Kings will re-emerge, and Queensway will continue to flood.
Is queensway always get flood?