Christchurch is a city of some 380K people (392K in the broader Christchurch area), making it the largest city on the South Island of New Zealand.

It is the capital of Canterbury, which is one of New Zealand's 16 administrative regions. Canterbury occupies about 2/3 if the east coast of the South Island. Inland, it extends west to the Southern Alps which run down the centre of the island. The city has an area of 1,426 sq km (551 sq mi), of which the urban part is about 295 sq km.

Christchurch sits about half way down the east coast of the island, with the city centre being 5 to 10 km from the ocean.

British settlers arrived in the 1850s through the efforts of the Canterbury Association. It was established to settle the Canterbury Plains that surround the city, which offered rich agricultural opportunities. The intention was to create a capital city which was centred around a cathedral and a college, much like a transplanted version of Oxford England. (Christ Church College Oxford being the place from which the city's name was reputedly derived.)

Serious settlement of the city started in 1850 with the despatch of the "First Four Ships" – the merchant sailing ships Randolph, Cressy, Sir George Seymour, and Charlotte Jane – with some 790 passengers to settle in the Canterbury region.

Christchurch is also one of the cities which provide a gateway for Antarctic exploration. There is a major Antarctic exhibition centre to the west of the city centre, which we went to on one of our days there.

The Southern Alps to the west are (often) visible across the Canterbury Plains. They are certainly beautiful, but they indicate the presence of a geological plate boundary between the westward moving Pacific plate, and the northward moving Indo-Australian plate. This is part of the Pacific's "Ring of Fire" series of faults, which are not just named poetically.

The result is that there can be significant earthquake activity in the region. Such activity happened catastrophically in 2010 and 2011.

It started with an earthquake known as the Darfield earthquake (named for the town that was at the epicentre, about 40 km west of Christchurch) at 4:35 AM on 4 September 2010. This was the severest earthquake in the series, with a magnitude from 7.0 to 7.1, but it was not the most destructive.

That was an after-shock with a magnitude of 6.3 which occurred at 12:51 PM on 22 February 2011. Whereas the focus of the first earthquake was about 10 km below the surface, the second one was only about 5 km below the surface and considerably closer to the centre of the city. The first earthquake had already weakened the structure of the soil, which also amplified the destruction of the second. About 80% of the water and sewerage facilities were damaged, many historic buildings were critically damaged (including the cathedral, which saw one entire end of it collapse), and worst of all the 6 story Canterbury TV building completely collapsed with the loss of 115 people. (It was later found to have been designed by someone who wasn't qualified to do it.)

Even as late as 2017, the results of the earthquake were the defining characteristic of the city. Christchurchians are a resilient and resourceful lot though, and although there were many damaged buildings still evident, the place had been cleaned up amazingly well. There was considerable improvisation to deal with issues until the damaged buildings could be restored or replaced.

For example, all through the central city we saw shipping containers. In some cases they were being used to hold up damaged walls, in other cases they were converted into improvised shops and offices.

I'm finally getting around to processing these images more than 5 years later in August 2022. (Though the first of them were not posted until May 2023.) It would be interesting to return to see exactly how much progress has been made over the last 5 (now 6) years. The progress over the first five was frankly astonishing.