Since the organ was installed in 1997, I have lived with this website and tried to tame it into submission. Now, in 2015, it  has fallen behind the fashions and developments of html, CSS and all the other gobbledygook that I've learned to contend with. Pages have fallen by the wayside, links occasionally don't work, and the look of it? EEEK. 
So now I am transferring the entire site over to the new Weebly system. It's a loooooong process. The main categories are now up, with the installation pictures and the extension pictures mostly in place. Now the real work of shifting the content such as David Bridgeman-Sutton's wonderful Musings and Amusings article over, as well as the amazing collection of reviews. It's incredible how many have accumulated over the years, from David, Philip Bailey, Peter Wilding, Grant Vicat and others. It would be a shame to lose these, so it will get done. It just won't get done over night.
The latest additions have been the Musings and Amusings articles, and the  sound samples, which I am adding snippet by snippet.  So much more to be done, and at last despairing calculation I figured I had completed about 4% of the entire transfer.
It's at times like this when I wonder what possessed me to start this website; but then, it's what happens when you get a bee in your bonnet about something. The Rieger organ in the Town Hall just happens to be my particular buzzy creature. 

So here's another world authority to confirm what we have known for years in Christchurch: that we have a top world-class acoustic in the Christchurch Town Hall. In a recent letter to The Press, Dr Ian Lochhead wrote: 


"What does Christchurch have in common with the following cities: Lucerne, Boston, Manchester, Vienna, Berlin, Paris, Lahti (Finland), Tokyo and Sao Paolo? According to an article by Professor Trevor Cox in The Guardian of (March 5) these cities possess 10 of the best concert halls in the world. Cox is Professor of Acoustic Engineering at the University of Salford and was President of the Institute of Acoustics from 2010 to 2012. He is also an acclaimed author and broadcaster on the science of sound. 

Here is confirmation by an international authority writing in one of the world’s leading newspapers of what we, in Christchurch, have always known; that our Town Hall is one of the best concert halls in the world. Seven of the concert halls in Cox’s list are in Europe, eight are in the northern hemisphere but only one is in Australasia. Of the cities listed only Lahti is smaller than Christchurch; all the others are many times its size.
Our Town Hall is an invaluable asset to the city that, if properly promoted, will generate cultural tourism, international recognition and civic pride while also fulfilling pressing local needs. Sadly, Cox is wrong about one thing; he reports that the Town Hall is currently being repaired." 

Thanks Ian - so well put. the article to which he refers can be found in The Guardian newspaper here.

I've now completed the transfer of David Bridgeman-Sutton's Musings and Amusings for 2009. Work has been slow because I enjoy re-reading them so much. It's like trying to tidy a home library or choose books to give to a second-hand book fair. David has such a wide-ranging interest that it's not all about organs. Trains, mechanisms of all kinds, people, favourite characters and even rhubarb comes into the equation (thanks mainly to David's wife Althea who could out-cook the best of chefs with one hand tied behind her apron strings). 
So go and enjoy a few musings from David while I keep working on the earlier years.