"The rationale was solely to donate an ambience feature perhaps not terribly imaginative or quirky, but still grist to the mill vis-a-vis enhancing the CBD," Jones said. The Wellington City Council will own and operate the clock, which cost about $23,000, of which $20,500 was provided by Jones.
It goes beyond ambience and well into the realm of public good.
In one's many walks around Wellington's CBD, it's been yonks since I've spotted a proper clock. There's a little one on the wall of a timepiece shop on Lambton Quay, but you've got to heading towards parliament to read it. The T&G building has a big one, but Dagg knows when the last time it told the time accurately.
The Wellington City Council and Library exteriors are bereft of temporal information. The ticker tape LEDs on the waterfront building will tell you that company X has dropped one cent, but it won't give you the time of day. Matter of fact, the only publicly available Big Clock now resides in the Botanical Gardens and that's a sundial. Lacking sun for the better part of last week, even this would have been out of order.
So it's good for Sir Bob to have a decent chronometer available for consumption in a public space. Although far from the beauty of this time teller, it's better than what's available at present, and it's not bloody digital neither.
