What does the recovery of Christchurch, New Zealand’s garden city, look like twelve years on from the 2010/2011 Canterbury earthquake sequence? And what lessons has its long-term recovery offered? To answer these questions, a field trip to Christchurch and in-depth interviews with policymakers, engineering professionals and other recovery practitioners were undertaken in October 2022. The recovery state of Christchurch Central Business District (CBD) was observed. Interviews revealed lessons from CBD’s recovery from a longitudinal, retrospective perspective. There was a consensus that between 70 per cent to 80 per cent of damaged buildings in CBD had been repaired or replaced for other functions. Significant delays can be attributed to 1) the scale of the event, with tens of thousands of aftershocks and widespread demolitions in CBD, 2) the delayed decision-making process, 3) overwhelmed legal changes, and 4) limited resource availability. Moreover, it is found that building resilience was emphasised and well incorporated in architectural designs to ensure redundancy provided in newly constructed and retrofitted buildings in CBD. Such consideration also incurred the broad adoption of low-damage designs (e.g., base isolation), despite a slightly higher repair cost. Further, this paper also investigated the effectiveness of recovery agencies and affirmed their essential role in recovery. While New Zealand is proactively preparing for major seismic events such as the Magnitude 8.0 Alpine Fault earthquake (AF8), lessons elicited from Christchurch recovery included the necessity of available training programmes for engineers, a stronger emphasis on building resilience in engineering design, a need for functionality-focused building code, and the development of advanced National Seismic Hazard Model (NSHM) specific to New Zealand. It is hoped that these lessons can collectively translate into enhanced earthquake preparedness and resilience in the future.