With Gap Filler marking its 15 year anniversary and preparing to close, I have found myself thinking about what it meant to me, not in theory, but in the small, ordinary moments that ended up shaping my life.
2012 was the kind of year that leaves marks. The quakes had hit Christchurch the year before, my fiancée and I had split, my landlord was using the earthquake repairs as cover to boot us out of our flat, and I was underemployed, halfway through a career change, trying to figure out what came next.
I had just agreed to purchase a business, Verboom Badges & Tees, based in Wellington, and I was genuinely tossing up whether to follow it north. The capital made sense on paper; a fresh start, closer to my grandmother, a city that was still in one piece with less heartbreak associated with it. The alternative was to double down on Christchurch, broken and ragged, and try and start from scratch in a city that felt as wrecked as I did.
My very first encounter with Gap Filler was the Pallet Pavilion, a temporary community venue under construction in town, seeking to create something in the vast empty gravel lots where a 5-star hotel once stood. Built using pallets, by volunteers, I spent several afternoons after class to come along and bolt pallets together and help lift stacks into place to create this magnificent, absurd structure.
At the time, it was just something to do. A way to be useful and fill my time and feel less lonely. I didn’t know I would later run a market stall in the same space I helped build. I did not know I would stand in front of a crowd several hundred strong, pitching my new atheist church at Ministry of Awesome’s pitch nights. I didn’t know I would host board game nights there and teach strangers how to play. I certainly did not know that somewhere in those projects were people who would make huge impacts on me, their paths already brushing past mine.
The following year I signed up for my first official Gap Filler project: The Inconvenience Store at Cathedral Junction. The concept was simple. Customers would wait while their T-shirts were made one at a time. No shortcuts. No warehouse full of stock. It was taking what I already do and just removing the curtain. The project ran for two weeks with no rent, and when it ended, I was welcomed back to take up space in other stores in the mall for a full year. It felt like Christchurch was offering me a foothold, and I was taking it.
Within that same mall, the hand of fate would continue to meddle, as other important people not yet in my life would continue to cross my paths.
Around the corner, murals were appearing on grey walls. It felt like every time I parked upon the rubble of some cleared lot to go to work; I would see a new mural gracing the side of a surviving building; many painted or funded by Oi You; a Christchurch Art house that did many colabs with Gap Filler.
After work one night, Valentines Day 2014, I went along to a Speed dating event held at the Pallet Pavilion; and there’s where I found a new girlfriend, and celebrated Holifest with her in March at the same location. The Pallet Pavilion came down in May 2014, the fire risk was finally too expensive to manage, but by then it had already done what it needed to do
That girlfriend and I broke up the following year; unrelated to the Pallet Pavilion demotion, but I guess the incompatibilities also became too much to manage; but it also taught me a valuable lesson that I could love again and be worthy of love again — very hard to contemplate when you have your first heartbreak.
Get Will Hunter’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Gapfiller had firmly helped teach me that Christchurch was a city that ordinary people like me could impact, could find a space in, heck could find love, socialize and have fun, and all of those things told me that Christchurch was a place I could call home.
In 2014 I exited my lease at Cathedral Junction. Before I did, I met someone else I would fall in love with. She was the sister of one of the Inconvenience Store collaborators. Our social circles had been orbiting each other for months through the projects and events that sprang up in those reclaimed spaces. I met her independently, only later discovering the connection. One of our early dates was volunteering at the new Bus Exchange, raising awareness for climate action. Again, a gap filled with people trying try make something better and feeling empowered to leave their mark on the city.
10 years pass; I fall in love with another woman (you may notice I have this pattern where I mark the currents of life by the love I find). This woman was the daughter of someone involved in the Oi You installations. She had walked past my shop in Cathedral Junction a decade earlier, in New Zealand for just a fortnight. We did not meet then. We were in the same small city, crossing the same spaces, unaware.
I stayed in Christchurch. That’s the short version. The longer version is that I stayed because Gapfiller helped show me a city that could be shaped by people like me, and once you’ve felt that, you can’t unfeel it. What Gap Filler did was invite people in. It handed over hammers and paintbrushes and said, this empty lot is not the end of the story. It made space for markets, for murals, for mini golf holes scattered across the city. It made room for conversations, for experiments, for first dates.
Every stranger who became a friend or something more — it was all teaching me the same lesson: this city is yours too. Help build it.
Fifteen years is a long time for something born from rubble. Its projects were temporary by design. Pallets removed. Some murals painted over. Pop ups packed down. But the effects linger in quieter ways. In the businesses that took root. In the friendships that started as passing conversations. In the relationships that might never have begun without a particular night in a particular reclaimed lot.
The gaps Gapfiller filled weren’t just the empty lots. It taught me that Christchurch was not just damaged, it was malleable. That it belonged to the people willing to show up. It answered a question I was carrying through that bruised year: do my actions matter here? Do I matter here?
Clearly, the answer is yes.
