This challenge is almost too easy in my town. The average life span of a business is 3 years. The average life span of a building is 12. The average (well, median) resident of the town leaves after 8 months. All is ephemera. The law of averages suggests that almost every place I go here will be gone in 10 years...

I decided that I would choose places with personal ties for me, both to the past and the furture. The first is currently a park, but until it burnt down last November it was the oldest continuously occupied shop in town (33 years), and the site of our family jewellery store. Of course during that time it mestasticised several times, slowly devouring neighbouring premeses... The site is due for redevelopment in 6 months time, when the surrounding shops will also be demolished to make way for one large building spanning all the sites. I can clearly picture the place of all objects within the building in several different incarnations, but all that is left of it is the fossil of it's threshold.

The building directly opposite also holds personal memories for me - I worked there from the ages of 11-20. It was THE oldest building in town - originally a pub and brothel during the gold rush. It had wiring snaking through all the internal spaces, safely packed with newspaper. Eventually a developer decided he would rebuild it. He was told that he needed to keep the facade - but everyone was unaware that the material holding the stones together was mud rather than morter or concrete, and the first decent rain caused it to fall into the street. The developer must now rebuild the facade using similar materials - though the mud will be upgraded. In the meantime they enshrouded the building with a ghostly chrysalis, marked with the ghostly future form of the building, and through which you can see the crane rearing from it's crater home.

The strangest thing about these buildings, and in fact every building in town, is how clearly I can picture all of the changed states over time. The town of my childhood seems no less solid than what is currently there. Some spaces hold 4 or 5 different remembered forms concurrently in the same space - which leads to some strange conversations with other long-time locals, all nameing different temporal slices of the same space.

Truely to live in Queenstown is to be less firmly anchored in time