by Val Diggle

Created on: November 19, 2009   Last Updated: November 20, 2009

Wellington styles itself as the finest little capital in the world, and the key to living in the city is to make the most of its relaxed, human-scaled environment. Most destination guides you will read focus on the city's compactness, which makes it easy to access the main tourist attractions that are clustered around the harbour. But if you make the decision to live more permanently in Wellington, and your work is located in the CBD, its relatively small scale and the close integration of domestic and business accommodation is also a big advantage.

I moved to Wellington a couple of years ago, and like most parents, the decision about where to locate my family was strongly influenced by the quality of the schools in the area. We ended up living in a suburb that gave us automatic access to an excellent boy's secondary school and great little primary school, and was also zoned for a girl's secondary school with a reputation for academic excellence, for when our daughter was older - nothing beats planning ahead!

The other key advantage of this district was that we could live close enough to the city centre to walk to work - an easy downhill stroll in the morning, and then use the cable car or bus home in the evenings. Public transport in Wellington is used by a greater percentage of the population than in any other New Zealand city. It is cheap and, though plenty of people moan about it, more reliable and friendly than the service I was used to back in the UK. A 'snapper' card system, a bit like a red plastic credit card, that you can get loaded with credit at most newsagents and supermarkets, can be used to pay for your fare, by swiping it as you get on and off the bus, instead of ordinary cash.

It was the easy availability of public transport, and the close proximity to work that made it possible for us to dispense with owning our own car. This reaped savings that we used to offset some of the costs incurred by the high rental value of property in the inner city suburbs. Property in Wellington is not cheap and this is, at first, bewildering, for, in comparison to the brick or stone solidity of the housing stock in England, the wooden dwellings with their tin rooves, perched precariously on stilts on the edge of the Wellington hills, look too temporary to be worth so many thousands of dollars.

After a living for a while in Wellington, I began to understand how appropriate these building materials are for its climate and geology. Fierce gales often whip through

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