A team of British disaster specialists will arrive in New Zealand tomorrow as the Christchurch earthquake death toll continues to climb, with 200 people still missing.

Although up to a third of the city’s buildings will have to be demolished as unsafe, Christchurch’s mayor, Bob Parker, suggested that the city’s cathedral could be rebuilt “brick by brick”. “We need to find some symbols like that,” he said. A new and stronger city would rise from the ruins. “The scale of what has happened here means we will have to take some bold steps.”

Families waiting for news of their loved ones caught up in the disaster continued to hope that they would be found alive and safe. Jo Morley, 44, whose brother Phil Coppeard, from Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, is among those missing, was taking comfort from the tales of survival after the Haiti earthquake. She said: “Of course you still hope, as anybody would do. That’s what we have to think.”