Taking the high road
Driving into town from the north, everyone believes there is a suburb (Pine Hill) on the left, then a cliff on the right below which Leith Valley nestles.
But there is a sizable finger of land reaching right into North Dunedin, with a few decent-sized ''lifestyle'' sections on it. I grew up on one of these. You couldn't get a pizza delivered there because nobody believed the place existed.
On my parents' title deed for the land there was a plan, criss-crossed with lines and the words ''designation removed'', indicating some sort of infrastructure had been proposed, then thought better of, which could explain the relative lack of development on this corridor.
By chance I recently came across an old Dunedin City Council document, the 1972 City of Dunedin District Scheme.
Flipping through the maps I was astonished to see a grey ribbon marking land designated ''street works'' and ''motorway'', connecting Pine Hill with Kaikorai.
A large roundabout would have linked it with Balmacewen Rd and it would have joined end-on to Kaikorai Valley Rd, much of which had been widened to four lanes (and since narrowed to two).
This road would have ramped down the tall cliff behind the DCC dog pound in Leith Valley, crossed Malvern St at the bend by the (now closed) Leith Valley Touring Park, ploughed up the Ross Creek valley, crossed the Otago Golf Club's Balmacewen course and Kaikorai Rugby Club's Bishopscourt ground, then squeezed between Balmacewen Intermediate School and the Araiteuru Marae through the Shetland St Community Garden, Kaikorai Common, Kaikorai Bowling Club and the Nairn St Reserve football field.
The planners would have needed to convince several sporting bodies and many residents of a reasonably well-off part of town to shift out of the way. That's quite a few owners of backyards ready to say ''not in mine''. Perhaps that's why it was never built.
• Peter Dowden now lives at the bottom of the Pine Hill cliffs.
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