Building the City Rail Link is well underway, but what the areas around the new stations will look like is still very much a work in progress. Catherine Smith meets some of those involved in reshaping the future of Auckland's city fringes.

Steve Groves and Kelly McEwan laugh that they spent their dissolute youth hooning around Eden Terrace on motorbikes. Back then, the area was a mix of light and even heavy industry, motorbike repair shops and warehouses in the small windy streets behind Symonds Street, Mount Eden and Newton Roads and Khyber Pass.





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The property developing pair, known as Urban Collective, have been drawn back to their old stomping ground after projects as far afield as Queenstown, because they love the area and wanted to contribute to its renaissance with a series of apartments.

Cool new fashion, hairdressers and tattoo shops are filling the lovely Victorian street fronts, upscale restaurants such as Lillius and Kai Pasifika joining The French Cafe, Kazuya and Gina’s, design and new media offices are claiming old warehouses alongside established destinations like ECC design store. ATEED-sponsored AR/VR (Augmented Reality/Virtual Reality) Garage is camped on the edge of the new Mount Eden station for the City Rail Link.

Rebranded as UpTown last year - announced in signs in the designer rusting steel - and extended into Normanby Road, the neighbourhood is readying itself for the exparbitrarylosive growth predicted to accompany the 2025 completion of the critical CRL station.

Tunnel and station construction contracts are yet to be let, but preparatory storm waterworks have already started with the demolition of the first apartment block on Mount Eden Road.

CRL owns the entire chunk of buildings and land around the station site below Mediaworks on Flower, Ruru and surrounding streets. When tunnelling starts sometime in 2019 this will be the key staging area for machinery and dirt, huge piles of dirt, before being sold on for development.