MR WARD’S MAP
VICTORIAN WELLINGTON STREET BY STREET
Elizabeth Cox
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KARAKA
THE MAP OF EVERYTHING
and engineer Thomas Ward approached the Wellington City Council with a proposal to produce a detailed map of the city. In 1891, a er two and a half years of hard work, it was nished. The map stretched from Thorndon in the north to Berhampore in the south, taking in the teeming inner-city areas of Te Aro and Newtown, the grand homes of Thorndon and The Terrace, the remnants of Māori kāinga (settlements), the Town Belt, Basin Reserve, the ‘lunatic asylum’ and hospital, the city’s emergent suburbs, reclaimed land, and
The map recorded the exact footprint of every building in the city — every commercial building and every house, every garden shed, stable and outdoor toilet. As well as a building’s shape, Ward recorded the number of its rooms and storeys, and what its walls and roof were made of. He mapped legal titles exactly, gave their dimensions, and provided the original town acre numbers and any subsequent subdivision numbers. He also mapped the dimensions of each street, as well as its level in relation to the high-water mark. He even recorded the location of electric street lights and the ‘ re plugs’ for the
Throughout the 1890s, Ward had a series of contracts to keep the council’s map set up to date, charting all the changes to the city’s buildings and streets in that decade. Every time a building was demolished and a new one put in its place, Ward or a council sta member glued a tiny piece of paper over the old building and drew in the new one. The lighter patches on some of the sheets show where this has happened.
Because this map set was a working copy in a busy council o ce, some of its sheets also contain scribbled notes and maths calculations, co ee-cup stains and drips of tea.
This book reproduces each of the 88 sheets of this later, updated, map, alongside stories that emerge from them. It focuses on the structure, culture and society of the city and its neighbourhoods in the 1890s, unveiling the layered history of Wellington in that decade. In order to support this in-depth view of the life of the city, where possible only photographs from the 1890s and 1900s have been selected for this book, to give the reader a view of the city as it was at the time the map was drawn.
The Ward map encompassed the area inside Wellington City Council’s boundaries: Thorndon, the central business areas around Lambton Quay, Willis Street, Courtenay Place and Cuba Street, the waterfront, Te Aro Flat, Mount Cook, Newtown, Berhampore, Aro By 1890, some suburbs, particularly in inner-city Te Aro Flat, and the foothills of Mount Victoria, Mount Cook and Thorndon, and parts of Newtown, were already closely settled. However, in the 1890s, there was an enormous increase in the city’s population — a rise of 44 per cent between the 1891 and 1901 censuses, from 31,021 to 43,638.2 This was by far the biggest population increase in a New Zealand city in this period,3 and it was the sort of growth that would have tested the infrastructure of even the best-planned city; by the turn of the century, Wellington was a city struggling under its own weight.
4 Adrian Humphris and Geo Mew, Ring Around the City: Wellington’s New Suburbs, 1900–1930 (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2009).
5 Nigel Isaacs, ‘By-laws Under the Municipal Corporations Act: Building Controls in the 1870s’, AHA: Architectural History Aotearoa 15 (2018): 44–51.
6 Municipal Corporations Act 1886, sections 242 and 273. The earlier Municipal Corporations Act 1876 had a similar instruction, and while some tenders called for such a map to be drawn of Wellington, it appears it was never completed; certainly no copy has yet been found. Even earlier than this, in 1874, the council called for tenders to create a detailed map of the city, and the Provincial Government surveyors o ered to do the work; perhaps it was not complete by the time the Provincial Government was abolished in 1876, as this has also not been found.
‘City Corporation [tender advertisement]’, New Zealand Times, 9 October 1874, 3; Personal communication, Adrian Humphris, 2025.
7 Ward to Town Clerk, 18 February 1889, enclosure in 00233-1894/747, Wellington City Council Archives. The city council was technically known as the Wellington Corporation at this point, but is referred to as the city council throughout this book.
The implications of Wellington’s rapid population increase is shown throughout the map, and this book. In the 1890s, there was no gentri cation of the inner city or close-by suburbs; indeed, quite the opposite. New factories and heavy manufacturing plants were still being built in the central city, despite the large population living in its closely packed streets. The reasons for this were multifaceted—because of the lack of public transport, people needed to be physically close to their workplaces, and as the city was hemmed in by the harbour, the Town Belt and the hills, space for large industrial sites became increasingly rare. The substantial area of land that sat idle, even in the centre of the city, ‘land banked’ by its owners, compounded the problem.
Ward’s map, and particularly its updates during the 1890s, reveals the push to develop new areas such as on the higher slopes of Mount Victoria, parts of Newtown and the nascent suburb of Berhampore. Some of these areas were still farmland up until 1890. These were all considered more healthy places to live than the inner city, and their growth was assisted by the increased span of the city’s public transport network during these years, especially the tram system. More town acres were also subdivided for residential and commercial development during this decade. There was even pressure to gobble up some of the Town Belt, which wrapped itself around much of the city, and the city’s other limited reserves, to make more space for houses and infrastructure.
Some areas that would today be considered part of Wellington were then managed by three neighbouring borough councils—Melrose, Onslow and Karori—and so were not included in the Ward map. Melrose Borough Council formed a horseshoe shape around Wellington City, beginning at the Botanic Garden and curving to include much of what became Kelburn, Brooklyn, Island Bay, Kilbirnie and Roseneath. Onslow included Wadestown, Cro on, Khandallah, Kaiwharawhara and the northern part of Thorndon Quay. Karori encompassed what later became parts of Kelburn and Northland, as well as Karori itself. To nd more space, Wellington’s population slowly began pushing out into these neighbouring local-authority areas. Prior to this, these three council areas had only very small populations, and growth remained relatively slow. In 1891, the councils had around 1000 people each; by 1901, this had increased to 3000 people in Melrose, 1500 in Onslow and 1200 in Karori.
Better roading and transport connections, such as the ‘cutting’ at the end of Constable Street, which improved access to Kilbirnie in 1899, the cable car from Lambton Quay to Kelburn, which began operating in 1902, and the new Karori Tunnel, built in 1900, supported this growth, but it wasn’t until a er Ward ceased updating his map and the new electric suburban tram system, and then motor cars, were introduced to the city that Wellington’s hinterland was properly unlocked, allowing many more urban-dwellers to move out into the suburbs.4 The lives of almost all Wellingtonians in the 1890s, therefore, were captured within the bounds of the Ward map.
THE MAKING OF THE MAP
In the 1880s, anxiety was growing about the impact of poor planning on the layout and functioning of New Zealand cities. A new Municipal Corporations Act was passed in 1886 that signi cantly improved the guidance given to councils about how they could, and should, manage their cities and urban areas. The legislation had a particular focus on sanitation and drainage, building controls, the laying out of streets, preventing ‘nuisances’, and improving water supply, tramways and lighting.
The previous Act had already granted local authorities the power to issue local by-laws; this was extended under the 1886 legislation to include by-laws to govern issues related to public health, the construction of buildings and, to counter the risk of re, the use of particular building materials for roofs and chimneys, and the distance between buildings. It also vested all drains in city councils, and gave councils powers to compulsorily take private land to improve drainage, to build new drains at private owners’ expense if necessary, and to borrow money to do so, in an e ort to improve the health of an area’s inhabitants.5
A theodolite manufactured in 1908 in London and similar to the one Ward would have used. Theodolites were the standard piece of equipment used by all surveyors at the time. Museum of Transport and Technology (MOTAT), W. F. Stanley and Company Limited, 2006.36
This Act also included an obligation on councils to produce two maps ‘as soon as convenient’—one showing all the streets, public and private, actual or intended, along with their elevation above sea level, and a second showing the course and levels of all drains. These were intended to govern where buildings, streets and drains could be built in the future.6
Thomas Ward wrote to the Wellington City Council in February 1889 o ering to create an ‘authentic map of the City of Wellington’ showing the exact size of legal land holdings in the city. He pointed out that the council’s existing maps were nothing more than ‘a picture of the city incorrectly drawn’.7 His initial proposal was for a fairly modest map to show only the roads and legal divisions of the land, with no buildings. His o er was accepted by the council on two conditions: that the council could use the map for any purpose, including to meet its obligations under the Municipal Corporations Act, and that it must be nished in 13 months.8
Four months later, Ward advised the council that he had been ‘actively pushing on with the Town map’, and o ered to add an outline of every building and outhouse and provide information about elevation above sea level throughout the city, ‘so as to make a contour of the city’.9 The council accepted his o er, and a new contract was drawn up that required him to mark the position and size of all ‘public and private streets, lanes, passages, courts, alleys and rights of way’, all public and private land holdings as recorded in the deed registrations, and their owners where possible, plus all ‘public and private buildings and all outhouses, outbuildings, and such like erections’. An exception was made for ‘fowlhouses’ (henhouses). Ward committed to completing this much more complex version of the map by August 1890, and to pay a penalty of £1 each week it was late. Ward was always careful to ensure the contracts gave him copyright over the map.10
Ward began his project by rst compiling records held at the Lands and Deeds Registry O ce, which would have provided him with information regarding land subdivisions and section sizes, and landowners’ names. Each map sheet gives the date January 1891 in the lower-right corner, but the map was not handed in to the council until some considerable time a er this—so perhaps this date marks the completion of this rst aspect of the task.
Ward physically surveyed the city, collecting data on every street in Wellington, including the lengths and widths of streets, the dimensions of legal sections and the outlines of building footprints. He made these measurements with a theodolite mounted on a tripod, the standard surveyor’s tool of the time. A theodolite could measure angles and distances between points on both horizontal and vertical planes, for small distances within the city as well as large distances across landscapes.
8 Ward to Town Clerk, 16 April 1889, enclosure in 002331894/747, Wellington City Council Archives.
9 Ward to Town Clerk, 27 June 1889, enclosure in 002331894/747, Wellington City Council Archives.
10 ‘Preparation of a map of the city [contract]’, 00002-319, Wellington City Council Archives.
11 Ward to Town Clerk, 19 August 1889, 00002-319, Wellington City Council Archives.
12 Ward to Town Clerk, 21 February 1901, 00233-1901/330, Wellington City Council Archives.
Ward must have employed at least one chainman to assist him with measuring distances. He would have stood at his theodolite while the chainman measured distances using a standard chain measure, made up of 100 standard steel links. (A ‘chain’—66 feet or 20.12 metres—became a standard unit of measure in Britain, Australia and New Zealand. An area of 10 square chains was equal to 1 acre.)
Ward recorded levels above the high-water mark at multiple points along each street, and within the town acres, to assist with the consideration of drainage issues in the city, which means he must have gained access to people’s backyards. In August 1889, he asked the council’s town clerk for a letter he could carry with him to prove he was working on a map. Presumably he wanted this to show to homeowners who were concerned to see him measuring their streets and peering at their houses.11
Although some information on the footprints of buildings may have come from the council’s own records, the council did not hold plans for most of the older homes in the city, built before the requirement that a proposed building plan must be supplied to the council—and even the newer house plans were not always accurately drawn. A letter from early 1901 shows that Ward was paying two assistants to help him measure up new houses at that point.12
Shown here are map sheets 59, 60, 67 and 68 stitched together. At its centre, where the four sheets meet, was the Mount Cook trig station, the ‘zero’ point of Ward’s map (discussed further in Sheet 67).
13 Ward to Town Clerk, 21 August 1890, 1890/1268, Wellington City Council Archives.
14 Ward to Town Clerk, 18 September 1891, 1891/1463, Wellington City Council Archives.
15 Ward to Town Clerk, 7 December 1891, 002331891/1868, Wellington City Council Archives.
16 [Untitled], New Zealand Times, 11 December 1891, 2.
17 Ward to Town Clerk, 22 November 1889, 1889/1861, Wellington City Council Archives.
18 ‘Brown, Thomson and Co.’, The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Wellington Provincial District] (Wellington: The Cyclopedia Company, 1897), 725–26; ‘Obituary: Mr Walter Leslie’, New Zealand Times, 9 July 1915, 5.
19 This list of owners is now stored at ‘Block maps of City of Wellington published by Thomas Ward . . .’, R20322884, Archives New Zealand, Wellington. A copy is also held at ‘City of Wellington [map]’, PamBox q832.4799gbbd, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
20 Adrian Humphris, ‘Appraisal Report and Worksheet: 1:500 scale footprint maps’, unpublished report, 2006, Wellington City Council Archives.
21 Ward to Town Clerk, 21 May 1894, enclosure in 002331894/747, Wellington City Council Archives.
22 Ward to Town Clerk, 28 September 1900, 002331900/1824, Wellington City Council Archives; ‘City Council’, New Zealand Mail, 22 November 1900, 18.
23 Humphris, ‘Appraisal Report and Worksheet’.
Providing all the building outlines and the extra data took Ward longer than originally planned. In August 1890, he asked for an extension, saying that he had been working ‘early and late’ to nish the project, yet ‘there is more to do than I anticipated’.13
Finally, a er ‘over 2½ years hard labour’, as he put it, in September 1891 Ward handed the map to the city surveyor to be checked.14 A few months later, he wrote to the town clerk:
I shall be pleased and grati ed to receive from the Corporation an expression of their approval of the work which has been one of great magnitude and I venture to say of much importance to the city. I beg to remind you that your Corporation is the only one in the country which possesses such a complete map and that I have spared no time or expense to make it thoroughly reliable ... and I shall be grati ed to know that your council is pleased with my work.15
The city’s mayor, Arthur Winton Brown, told a council meeting that the map was ‘most valuable’, and he and the councillors agreed to send Ward a thank-you letter.16
Ward had urged the council to spend a little extra to print the maps on good-quality cartridge paper to allow the sheets to be ‘freely handled without injury’.17 At the request of the council, he arranged for 20 copies to be lithographed at the Lambton Quay rm Brown, Thomson and Co., stationers, booksellers, printers, lithographers and bookbinders. Their lithographic machine was said to be the largest in Wellington, and could produce substantial maps for clients including the Survey Department. The name of artist and political cartoonist Walter Leslie, the lithographer who worked on this enormous project, appears at the bottom of each sheet.18
The list Ward had compiled on all the streets, their widths and the owners of each legal title, was also printed. Unfortunately, only a fragment of this list—for around 20 of the sheets—appears to have survived.19
What happened to all of the 20 original sets of the map is not entirely clear. Wellington City Council Archives now holds a complete unannotated set of the original 88 map sheets. It seems probable that at least one set was put aside by the city council untouched. It is also possible, however, that the set held by the archives is an amalgamation of part-sets that have been put together. Other sets were used by departments of the council, such as the drainage, engineering, and building permits departments, for their own purposes, and some may have been sold or given to other organisations.20
Ward then entered into a series of contracts with the council throughout the 1890s to update every six months at least one set of the map, recording all changes to buildings and streets. Ward came to the council o ces to draw the changes on the map, including gluing small pieces of paper over the top of demolished structures and drawing in new ones. From February 1892, the city council’s new building permit system required owners to submit house plans by their architect or builder to the council for their records before they built or altered a building. These plans would have provided Ward or council sta with some of the material needed to keep track of changes to the buildings in the city, but Ward and his assistants also surveyed new buildings. It is clear from some imprecise and wobbly lines drawn on the map, reproduced in this book, that people less skilled than Ward also sometimes had a hand in updating it.
In 1894, he commented that he was nding the clerical updating work to be ‘very considerable’, and he asked the council to allow him to do it only every 12 months.21 The succession of contracts must have lapsed at some point, as in 1900 he wrote to the council expressing concern that the map was now considerably out of date and proposing to ‘thoroughly revise the whole map’, and the list of owners. The council agreed to a further three-year contract.22 It is not certain exactly when Ward and others stopped the updating process. The 88 updated sheets reproduced in this book were, at least for a time, in the hands of the government department Valuation New Zealand, and were returned to the city council archives in 1999. Based on which new buildings are shown and which are not, it seems likely this set was last updated in 1900 or 1901.23
& 16
A ROYAL VISIT
SHEET 15
Streets
[Ballantrae Place], Eccleston Hill, Guildford Terrace, Hawkestone Crescent [Motorway], Hill Street, Museum Street, Selwyn Terrace, Sydney Street [Sydney Street West]
Town Acres
502, 503, 504, 505, 525, 548, 549, 550, 551, 552, 553, 554, 555, 556, 557, 558, 559, 560, 561, plus Reserve 3
Other named sites
Convent, [site of Roman Catholic Cathedral], Parliamentary Buildings, Public Cemetery, Museum, Government House
SHEET 16
Streets
Charlotte Street [Molesworth Street], Fraser’s Lane [Aitken Street], Golder’s Hill [Eccleston Hill], Hill Street, John Street [Guthrie Street], Lambton Quay, Molesworth Street, Mulgrave Street, Murphy Street, Park Terrace [Collina Terrace], Pipitea Street, Sydney Street [Kate Sheppard Place], Wingfield Street
Town Acres
513, 514, 515, 531, 532, 533, 534, 535, 536, 537, 538, 539, 562, 563, 564, 565, 579, 580, 585, plus Government House grounds
Other named sites
Metropolitan Hotel, Provincial Hotel, Fire Brigade Station, Wellington Hotel, Primitive Methodist Church, Royal Hotel, Thistle Hotel, St Paul’s School 16 15
In June 1901, Wellington, indeed the whole country, was in an enormous utter about the royal visit of the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, the rst English royals to visit New Zealand for 30 years. The Duke was Queen Victoria’s grandson; she died as the planning for the trip was under way and his father had become King Edward VII just months before.
The Wellington leg of the Duke and Duchess’s tour began with their arrival on the royal yacht Ophir at Queen’s Wharf on 18 June, where they were met by enormous crowds. The royals were then paraded around the streets of Wellington in an open coach, passing under a series of 11 large purpose-built archways. The preparations for the archways had been stalled by wet weather, and the journalists pacing the city waiting for the royal yacht to appear reported on the sad state of some in the hours leading up to the arrival.
The rst archway the couple travelled under, made by the Wellington Woollen Company, was wrapped in woollen blankets and raw wool, and labelled ‘See the Warmth of our Welcome’. The procession then continued along Jervois Quay and Cuba, Willis and Manners Streets, which were all highly decorated, including with more themed archways that frequently featured huge painted images of the royals themselves. One on Manners Street was funded by the Chinese community (discussed in Sheet 33); others were supported by the Dairy Association of New Zealand, the people of Marlborough and Wellington suburbs (a ‘cereal arch’), and Westport coal merchants, who funded an archway made of massive pieces of coal.
As the royal procession neared Government House, the residence of the governor of New Zealand, where they were staying in Wellington, their carriages passed beneath a nal arch built by the local Māori community. Hapi Puketapu from Lower Hutt, and Joseph Te Puni from Petone provided some of the carvings for the archway, and Alexander Turnbull, who had a large collection of Māori artefacts, had loaned some from his collection as well. A group of mana whenua waited at the arch to greet the royals as they passed beneath.
Mana whenua wait beneath the ‘Maori arch’ on Charlotte Street to greet the royal visitors on 18 June 1901. Alexander Turnbull Library, PA1-q-1003-08
1 ‘The Royal Visit’, New Zealand Times,19 June 1901, 5; Judith Bassett, ‘“A Thousand Miles of Loyalty”: The Royal Tour of 1901’, New Zealand Journal of History 21, no. 1 (1987): 125–38.
2 ‘A retrospect and a contrast’, New Zealand Times, 22 June 1901, 4.
It isn’t always easy to safely interpret from newspaper reports what occurred at Māoriled ceremonies, as Pākehā journalists of the time were o en ignorant of what they were observing, but it seems the group sang waiata, and an elderly man with white feathers in his hair greeted the couple with a haka or wero. Children were seated up in the roof of the archway chanting ‘somewhat plaintively’, and stamping their feet as the visitors went underneath, slightly frightening the horses.1
Photographs show a group of perhaps 20 adults and a number of children, many wearing piupiu and kākahu, as well as Western clothes and hats. The large arch itself was in the form of a wharenui, 15 feet across. Words of welcome reading ‘Haere mai haere mai’ and ‘Nau mai nau mai’ could be read on either side of the archway. (This use of te reo was common to a number of the other archways throughout the city.) Re ecting on the a ermath of the visit, the editor of the New Zealand Times judged the Māori arch the most inspiring, and that the breadth of history encompassed in the antique carvings used to decorate it, some of which were thought to be hundreds of years old, ‘is something to be said of a country of which we are accustomed to speak as without a past’.2
Unfortunately, none of the accounts found thus far recorded the names of the Māori participants. It is likely that most were from Te Ātiawa and other Taranaki iwi, and Ngāti Toa. Some may have lived in Wellington, and others at Petone, the Kapiti Coast or the Wairarapa. Some, such as the MPs and those otherwise connected to Parliament, may have been from elsewhere in the country.
The governor’s home, Government House, where the royals stayed, was a large Italianate building on Sydney Street, shown at the bottom of Sheet 15. Since the formation of the colony, governors had been appointed by the British sovereign—Queen Victoria up until this visit—to represent the monarch in New Zealand, usually for ve years. In the earlier years of the colony, most governors had been professional administrators, usually military men, and had wielded signi cant political power, but from the 1890s they were appointed from the minor English aristocracy and held more of a ceremonial role. The incumbent governor during the royal visit was Lord Ranfurly, who had held the post since 1897.
The royal tour events and their guest lists were carefully managed by the premier, Richard Seddon, and his Liberal government as a way of showing favour to their supporters and to shore up political support. In Wellington, the royal couple hardly had time to draw breath a er their arrival at Government House before a dizzying set of events ensued. On the rst day, they were requested to watch a long march-past of men from the city’s friendly societies and other organisations from a window, and that evening there was a lengthy reception with hundreds of guests. They were then taken to unveil a foundation stone for the future Wellington Town Hall (Sheet 34), and the new government railway o ces (Sheet 23).
The following day, sisters-in-law Alla Atkinson and Flora Richmond, members of the in uential and interconnected Atkinson and Richmond clans who were no friends of the Seddons, reluctantly appeared at an a ernoon reception at Government House for the Duke and Duchess, along with hundreds of other guests. Their husbands (Edmund Tudor Atkinson and Maurice Wilson Richmond) had refused to attend. Alla later wrote a letter vividly describing her experience. The Wellington weather was ruthless, but the organisers hadn’t planned for such a contingency. Alla and Flora arrived in sodden cloaks and ruined hats, and to their dismay were told that there was nowhere to leave them, or even to take them o . Alla and Flora met some other half-drowned guests on the way into the building, and together they ‘determined to die rather than take our wet things into the drawing room’.
While we were talking and stripping ourselves of galoshes etc I observed that the Duke was looking calmly at us through the window . . . Well we screwed up our courage and leaving all but our umbrellas on the verandah bolted round the house in a regular tornado. I li ed my new cloth dress up high and was instantly wet through to the skin . . . the Duke and Duchess each shook hands
The crowd on the Government House lawn, with the house in the background, watching kapa haka performances during a fête held in aid of the proposed Queen Victoria School, a boarding school for Māori girls in Auckland, in October 1902. Lord and Lady Ranfurly are in the front (he with the top hat and she to his left). There were performances by at least three large kapa haka groups, from Ōtaki, Porirua and Wairarapa, as well as the famous Ōtaki Maori Brass Band. After the fête, the performers were given afternoon tea in the house. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, AWNS-19021023-09-02
3 ‘Anne (Alla) Atkinson to Dorothy (Dolla) Richmond, 2 June–1 July 1901, MS-Papers 4863-09, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
4 Bee Dawson, Lady Travellers: The Tourists of Early New Zealand (Auckland: Penguin, 2001), 157.
and smiled and we each tried not to return the shake too a ectionately and to get in a bobbing curtsey and to look both full in the face at the same time ... One woman dropped her galoshes at the Duchess’s feet and had to be held up by her while she picked them up . . . I should think it wasn’t particularly healthy for them to be surrounded by 1500 dripping wet people . . . the carpets were, I hope, ruined.3
The Duchess also attended a ‘Maoriland Fete’ organised by Lady Ranfurly at the new art gallery on Whitmore Street as a fundraising event for the planned ‘House for Incurables’, a home for the chronically or terminally ill. This resulted in a new hospital building, the Victoria Hospital for Chronic Invalids, which opened in 1905 in Newtown. The general public could buy tickets for this event, and it was a way for the people to get a closer look at the Duchess.
The rst o cial residence for the governor in Wellington, in William Wake eld’s former home, was in the area that later became the parliamentary reserve. This second residence was designed by architect William Clayton in an elegant style reminiscent of Queen Victoria’s residence Osborne House, although in timber rather than stone. It was the home of the governor from the 1870s until 1907. It was occupied by three governors and their wives and children during the 1890s and early 1900s: Lord and Lady Onslow from 1889 to 1892, Lord and Lady Glasgow from 1892 to 1897, and then Lord and Lady Ranfurly from 1897 to 1904. The governor’s salary was signi cantly reduced in the 1880s, making the job much less nancially rewarding. Governors were required to bring their own furniture and furnish the house themselves. Dudley Alexander, the private secretary and aide-de-camp to the Ranfurlys, kept meticulous records of the family’s time in New Zealand. He calculated they had entertained 3338 guests at dinner, and almost 30,000 guests at balls and other entertainments, all at signi cant nancial loss.4
20 & 21
‘ LIVING ON THIS MOUNTAIN OF A HILL’
SHEET 20
Streets
Glenbervie Terrace, Karori Crescent [Patanga Crescent], Karori Place [Motorway], Karori Street [Patanga Crescent], Lewisville Road, St Mary Street, Tinakori Road, Wesley Road
Town Acres 516, 518, 621, 622, 623, 624
Other named sites
Botanic Garden
SHEET 21
Streets
Ascot Street, Aurora Terrace, Bolton Street, [Easdale Street], Glenbervie Road [Bowen Street], Glenbervie Road Deviation, [Kinross Street], Salamanca Road, San Sebastian Road [part now Clifton Terrace], Sydney Street West, Wesley Road
Town Acres
492, 493, 494, 495, 496, 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 518, plus Parsonage Reserve, Wesleyan Reserve
Other named sites
Jewish Cemetery, Public Cemetery, Church of England Cemetery, Botanic Garden
Sir James Prendergast’s residence on Bolton Street, c.1904. Charles Sorrell photograph, copy negative E748/37, Hocken Collections — Uare Taoka o Hākena, Univesity of Otago — Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka
Young Marjorie Knight led a very isolated childhood high on the Bolton Street hill in the early 1900s.1 Her father, Charles Knight, was a lawyer who worked for his great-uncle, Sir James Prendergast (1826–1921), former attorney-general and chief justice of the Supreme Court since 1874, before setting up his own legal practice at the turn of the century. Prendergast was also acting governor during periods when New Zealand was waiting for its next governor to arrive from the United Kingdom. He is best remembered for his judgment in the 1877 case Wi Parata v Bishop of Wellington that the Treaty of Waitangi was a ‘simple nullity’ and irrelevant to domestic law, as the courts could not recognise Indigenous title. He was not the rst judge to make such a decision, but his statements were used to justify the alienation of signi cant amounts of Māori-owned land in the decades to come.2
1 Much of this story is based on an interview with Marjorie Knight (later Lees) recorded in ‘Two Wellington Childhoods’, Spectrum no. 012, 1972, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, 15569, ngataonga.org.nz/search-usecollection/search/15569
2 J. G. H. Hannan and Judith Bassett, ‘Prendergast, James’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1990. Te Ara — the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt. nz/en/biographies/1p29/ prendergast-james
Prendergast and his wife Mary Jane had no children, but he was the patriarch of a large family of young relations, of whom a number of the boys went into law and a number of the girls married lawyers. As Marjorie described it, Prendergast was ‘the principal person’ in the family. Prendergast owned ve town acres at the top of Bolton Street, and had a large house on Town Acre 497. When her parents rst married, they had lived in a house of their choosing, but by the time Marjorie was a young child Prendergast had ‘provided’ them with a new house on one of his town acres above his own residence — a ‘new, large, hideous Edwardian mansion’, as Marjorie remembered it. The house was surrounded by the Botanic Garden, the cemetery and the huge garden of Prendergast’s own house (‘a sort of wilderness’, as she put it), so it is little wonder she felt isolated, but she was also distant from her own family. She was brought up mostly in the nursery by a nurse, and never went into any of the other rooms without being invited. She did not eat with her parents, and was allowed into the library only in the evening to have a story read to her.
Marjorie’s abiding memory of the house was ‘feeling frightened all the time’, particularly on her journey back up the stairs on her own to the nursery a er visits to the library. Her next sibling was ve years younger, and she had few friends — she even recalled explaining to a girl who lived further down Bolton Street, and who had visited just once,
3 Frances Porter, ‘Richmond, Mary Elizabeth’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1996. Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt.nz/en/ biographies/3r19/richmond-maryelizabeth
4 Tosti Murray, Marsden: The History of a New Zealand School for Girls (Wellington: Marsden School Old Girls’ Association, 1967).
5 Margaret Alington, ‘Baber, Esther Mary’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1996. Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt.nz/en/ biographies/3b1/baber-esthermary
6 Roberta Nicholls, ‘Elite Society in Victorian and Edwardian Wellington’, in The Making of Wellington, 1800–1914, edited by David Hamer and Roberta Nicholls (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 1990), 199–200.
7 Katherine Mansfield, ‘The Sheridans’, in The Journal of Katherine Mansfield (London: Constable, 1984).
8 ‘Acting Governor’s Ball’, Observer, 4 June 1892, 9.
9 Marjorie Knight (later Lees), recorded in ‘Two Wellington Childhoods’, Spectrum no. 012, 1972, Ngā Taonga Sound & Vision, 15569, ngataonga.org.nz/searchuse-collection/search/15569
10 Census of the Colony of New Zealand, 1901. Note this is the figure for the whole Wellington region, not just Wellington City.
11 ‘Sweating Commission’, Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR), H-5 (1890): 73.
12 Megan Cook, ‘Domestic Workers’ Unions, 1890–1942’, in Women Together: A History of Women’s Organisations in New Zealand / Ngā Rōpū Wāhine o te Motu, edited by Anne Else (Wellington: Historical Branch, Department of Internal A airs and Daphne Brasell Associates Press, 1993), nzhistory. govt.nz/women-together/domesticworkers-unions
that their friendship had to end because her nurse considered the family ‘too common’, a situation similar to that in Katherine Mans eld’s story ‘The Doll’s House’, in which Mans eld recalled, during her own Wellington childhood, not being allowed to play with, or even speak to, the daughters of the local washerwoman.
Marjorie attended Mary Richmond’s private kindergarten, which was down the hill from her house, in the Congregational Church hall on the corner of Bowen Street and Wellington Terrace (Town Acre 474, Sheet 22). Mary Richmond was one of New Zealand’s rst kindergarten teachers, and had travelled to London to train in the Friedrich Froebel method of teaching children, which embraced play and creativity in children’s education rather than rote learning and discipline.3 Richmond returned to Wellington to set up her own kindergarten and preparatory school in the church hall in 1898, catering for children up to the age of seven. She later founded the Wellington Free Kindergarten movement to ensure that poor children received a similar play-based education.
Mary Richmond’s pupils played in the garden of Elibank, the home of Walter Turnbull, across the road on Wellington Terrace (Town Acre 490, Sheet 22).4 Although Richmond had intended to only take the children of her friends, the kindergarten expanded until it had around 50 pupils, including the children of the governor, Lord Plunket. Marjorie recalled that the Plunket children were ‘considered the star pupils’, and were given the best parts in the plays the kindergarten put on. From 1899 to 1906, Marjorie attended Pipitea Private School, a private girls’ school set up on Pipitea Street (Sheet 16) by Esther Baber and Dorothy (Dolla) Richmond, also followers of the ideas of Froebel.5 As a teenager, she was then taught by young women students from Victoria University College, before becoming one of the rst boarders at Iona College in Havelock North.
Marjorie’s mother Selene Davy had been an early woman graduate of Canterbury University, but by this time, as Marjorie put it, her occupation ‘seemed to be paying calls and receiving calls, and she o en used to take me too . . . little children must be seen and not heard. So I’d be taken along and say nothing.’ Their drawing room was set aside for receiving women. She recalled that it was very rare for the family to order cabs, despite ‘living on this mountain of a hill’; they were reserved for special occasions such as balls at Government House. Instead, her mother ‘walked miles and miles and miles in those long trailing dresses to pay calls’. She herself was dressed up in ‘a horrible starched muslin frilly dress that scratched like mad and a large sash around my middle’.
This ‘occupation’ of calling was a mainstay of life for upper-class women in Wellington, partly because their relationships with other wealthy women could shore up the business relationships and friendships of their husbands. Historian Roberta Nicholls’ analysis of Agnes Grace’s diary in 1885 found she o en called on six or seven women in just one a ernoon, perhaps for only 15 minutes at a time; Agnes kept careful lists of those she’d visited.6 Katherine Mans eld also recalled the social ‘calling’—her character Mrs Sheridan returns home a er ‘Heaven knows how many calls’, sighing ‘Thank Heaven, that’s all over!’ and ‘What nonsense calling is! What a waste of time! I have never met a single woman yet who even pretended to like it. Why keep it up then?’7
The social events of the elite were much reported on in the women’s pages of the newspapers. Reports on the ladies’ dresses at the governors’ balls took up column a er column, the women listed in their order of precedence, with the governor’s wife and daughters always rst, if they were in attendance. This was, of course, a way to demonstrate social class and a uence to the readers of the newspapers and magazines. In 1892, during one of his stints as acting governor, James and Mary Jane Prendergast held a ball at Government House to mark Queen Victoria’s birthday and to which 550 people were invited. Mary Jane, as the acting governor’s wife, was reported as wearing a cardinal blue and black dress, trimmed with lace, and her niece, Marjorie’s mother Selene, wore ‘a beautiful dress of green and gold with lovely yellow fan and beautiful bouquet’.8 Marjorie recalled of her mother, ‘When she was well, she was very gay, and went out to lots of parties and things. And when she was ill, she sort of drooped about in lovely blue tea gowns.’9
Mary Richmond (seated in the centre) and her kindergarten teachers and pupils at the rear of the Congregational Church hall. The photograph was taken around 1904, so it is possible that Marjorie Knight is in the photograph, as she would have been around seven at the time. Alexander Turnbull Library, 1/2-068309-F
The other character who loomed large in Marjorie’s childhood memories was her Scottish nurse, whom she called Nan. Nan resented being a servant and told Marjorie that she never wanted to have children if it meant consigning them into a life of domestic service. By 1901, around 4000 women were working as domestic servants in the Wellington region.10 The very large houses of the Wellington elite could not function without these servants, but young colonial women were not attracted to the drudgery of domestic service, or to tying themselves to the whims of a mistress, and a growing number of Wellington shops, factories and dressmaking establishments could o er the daughters of working families more attractive employment options. The di culty of recruiting and retention of domestic servants, or ‘the servant problem’ as it became known, was a constant worry for elite women.
One young Wellington woman gave evidence to the government’s 1890 investigation into conditions in factories, known as the Sweating Commission, that she had worked 16 hours a day as a domestic servant. She had worked in four Wellington houses and three of her mistresses had been ‘tyrants’, she said. She queried why men working on the wharves had industrial protection, but women working in private homes did not. She had given up the profession to work as a dressmaker, and challenged the commonly held thought that girls were too proud to be servants: ‘It is the hard work and not pride which causes girls to give up being domestic servants and go into factories. I would sooner be a servant if I could get a good mistress.’ 11
Overleaf: The view down Bolton Street—‘this mountain of a hill’, as Marjorie Knight remembered it. Government House, the governor’s residence (with the tower), is at the bottom of the hill, and the Parliament buildings are to the left. Alexander Turnbull Library, PAColl-0495-02
Domestic servants had been le out of the protections for workers introduced by the Liberal government with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act 1894. As historian Megan Cook has argued, this exclusion was the result of strongly held beliefs regarding ‘the nature and value of domesticity and the work necessary to maintain it . . . An almost entirely female workforce, doing what another group of women did uncounted and unpaid, was not part of the recognised industrial or commercial world’.12
Two unions were formed for Wellington domestic servants in the 1890s, one led by Kate Evans (1857–1935), the rst woman to receive a university degree in New Zealand (mentioned in Sheets 70 and 71), and the other by Marianne Tasker (1852–1911), the wife of John Tasker, a clerk in the Police Department, who had been a domestic servant herself. Kate Evans’ approach was to try to persuade employers to treat their servants more fairly, to limit the hours servants had to work, and to ensure they were given at least one half-day o a week.
Streets
Harbour Street [Willeston Street], Harris Street, Hunter Street extension, Jervois Quay, [Maning Lane], Mercer Street [Civic Square], Victoria Street, Willeston Street
Other named sites
Shed G, Shed M, Shed N, Shed O, Shed P, School of Design
SHEET
The temporary buildings built to house the 1896–97 Wellington Industrial Exhibition. Alexander Turnbull Library, 1/2-032452-F
A number of circuses, many of them originating in Australia, constantly travelled the country in the 1890s, and would arrive in Wellington sometimes several times a year. A small team would come before the circus itself to decorate the town with bright advertising hoardings and to construct the big top. The circus performers would then arrive by train or steamer, and parade through the streets to the tent. The circus needed only to advertise its location as ‘on the reclaimed land’ as by the time the tent was erected everyone would know where it was. Journalist Pat Lawlor, who grew up in Wellington at the time, recalled ‘the mere presence of the huge tent on the reclaimed land would keep us spellbound for a week. And the elephants were so big that you could see them for nothing.’ 1
1 Pat Lawlor, Old Wellington Days (Wellington: Whitcombe & Tombs, 1959), 38.
2 ‘FitzGerald Bros.’ Circus’, New Zealand Times, 24 November 1894, 4; Gillian Arrighi, The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus: Spectacle, Identity and Nationhood (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2015).
3 ‘Gale at Wellington’, New Zealand Herald, 20 January 1896, 5; Arrighi, The FitzGerald Brothers’ Circus, 109–11.
In 1894, the FitzGerald Brothers circus arrived in Wellington from Australia with a team of 80 human performers, including an orchestra, acrobats, gymnasts, contortionists and horses riders, along with 70 horses and eight cages of wild animals, including lions, tigers, wolves and a dingo. The FitzGerald Brothers promoted themselves as o ering not simply a spectacle but also scienti c learning to the youth of the city, with their ‘zoological garden on wheels’.2 During their visit two years later, a southerly gale caused a sensation when the wind ripped a hole in the canvas tent and snapped its support poles. The tent was repaired, and the show went on. The nal act of the night was ‘Professor Peart’, a high diver, who dived into a small tank of water from a platform xed 60 feet (18 metres) up the circus pole. Peart died in Sydney just months later, performing this same stunt.3
When Ward rst drew his map, almost all the land on this sheet had recently been reclaimed from the sea and had not yet been built upon. It became the venue for many special events, including open-air election and trade union meetings, and the 1896–97 Wellington Industrial Exhibition, whose buildings included a concert hall, a ‘hall of mystery’ and an art gallery. A cycling and running track and grandstand were also built nearby.
A poster advertising the arrival of the Australian FitzGerald Brothers’ ‘Circus and Menagerie of Performing Wild Animals’, showing in Wellington for seven days in December 1894. Alexander Turnbull Library, Eph-ECIRCUS-1894-01-1
4 [Editorial], New Zealand Times, 19 November 1896, 2.
5 ‘The exhibition building’, New Zealand Mail, 3 December 1896, 50.
6 ‘The industrial exhibition’, Evening Post, 18 November 1896, 5; ‘At the exhibition’, New Zealand Times, 11 December 1896, 3.
7 ‘Wellington exhibition sports’, Evening Post, 19 October 1896, 2.
8 Being brand new, the naming of these two technologies wasn’t quite settled, and the kinematograph was sometimes spelled cinematograph or cinematographe, by di erent promoters.
9 [Advert], Evening Post, 12 December 1896, 6; ‘The camera column’, New Zealand Mail, 24 December 1896, 12; Clive Sowry, ‘Whitehouse, Alfred Henry’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt.nz/en/ biographies/2w16/whitehousealfred-henry
10 [Advert], Evening Post, 12 December 1896, 6.
11 ‘How Wellington may see the Jubilee Shows’, Evening Post, 14 September 1897, 5.
12 ‘Close of the exhibition’, New Zealand Mail, 11 February 1897, 32.
13 ‘A power crane’, New Zealand Graphic, 13 June 1891, 61.
The New Zealand Times considered the exhibition a great success, although it admitted that the architecture of the buildings was perhaps de cient. It said, possibly rather defensively, ‘It is not an exhibition of architecture, it is an exhibition of products natural and manufactured. No one cares about the buildings which house them . . . and all round without and within much bunting has covered de ciencies with gaiety and colour.’ 4
The front of the exhibition’s main building, which faced Cuba Street, had towers and a large stained-glass window illuminated by electric light. Inside, a large fountain featuring a statue of a Māori girl with a basket of pipi on her head and a nīkau was lit up by coloured electric lights. The fountain was constructed from clay by the Wellington tile and brick rm Peter Hutson and Co. (discussed in Sheets 73 and 74) and the gure had been modelled by W. H. Barrett, the modelling teacher at the School of Design, with the rest, including dolphins, built by Hutson’s head potter Thomas Dee.5
Many of Wellington’s companies displayed their work, and there were exhibits by the School of Design and displays of ‘home industries’ organised by a committee of women. Walter Turnbull and Briscoes, both signi cant importers of tea, built tea kiosks—in the case of Briscoes, in the style of a Chinese pagoda. Whitcombe and Tombs exhibited their stationery and the New Zealand Candle Co. had an ‘attractive design’, Messrs Yerex and Jones exhibited typewriters and Mr Fear sewing machines. Robert Martin, mentioned in Sheet 33, displayed his Wellington-made stained-glass windows, wallpapers and other wares. The engineering rm Cable and Co. displayed some of their machinery, and the Railway Department a New Zealand-manufactured saloon car and locomotive.
The concert hall was the venue for the opening events, attended by the governor, who was entertained by the Wellington Garrison Band and a choir of 300 children. Numerous other events were held over the months of the exhibition; these included performances by Madame Cope and her pupils, ‘magical lantern’ slide shows by Christchurch architect Samuel Hurst Seager and gymnastic displays by children.6 This was the height of the bicycle craze and the cycling track was very popular; 1000 people were estimated to have attended one race and there were events such as the ‘best decorated ladies bicycle’ competitions.7
A special room was set aside for the kinematograph, the newly arrived technology to project moving pictures. Two new and competing pieces of technology—the kinematograph and the kinetoscope—were circulating the country at the time.8 The kinetoscope, which had been developed in Thomas Edison’s laboratory, was an early motion picture device that could be experienced by one person at a time through a small viewer window. Alfred Whitehouse exhibited a kinetoscope throughout towns and cities in New Zealand, together with a phonograph to play music that matched the actions on the screen: ‘Japanese girls are seen dancing, in perfect time, to a New York Orchestral Band’, he advertised. Whitehouse must have also recorded the Wellington Garrison Band, as their music was added to his advertising.9
The kinematograph arrived in the city just in time to be a part of the exhibition. The promoters of this technology, which the inventors, the Lumière brothers, had only publicly screened for the rst time a year before, advertised it in direct competition to Whitehouse’s kinetoscope: ‘No Miniature Picture; No Waiting your Turn; No Toy or Peep-show; but Actual Reproduction of Life of Every Variety.’ 10 Their lms included one of Eugen Sandow, the famous German muscle man, dancers and a re-enactment of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots.
The once slow connections between early colonial Wellington and the wider world changed in the face of technological advancement. In September 1897, crowds gathered at the Wellington Opera House to watch a lm of the parades held in London for the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria, only three months earlier. The lm captured Richard Seddon and his wife Louisa taking part in the parade. The Opera House audience (which included Seddon, the governor and members of the Cabinet) rose to its feet three times to sing the national anthem as the Queen’s carriage moved across the screen: ‘In every instance we get an excellent idea of the patriotic spirit of the people, the uttering of handkerchiefs and waving of the headgear amongst the crowds always signalling the approach of the Queen.’ 11
The following year, Alfred Whitehouse imported a camera to make his own moving pictures, as discussed in Sheets 97 and 98.
During the exhibition’s 11 weeks, it was visited by 180,000 people, a remarkable gure given Wellington’s wider population was only 50,000. The buildings were demolished soon a er, but the cycling track remained in place for some time longer.12
At the top of the sheet is one of the outer ‘T’s of Queen’s Wharf (as discussed in Sheet 27), showing Shed G. A number of other wharf sheds lining Jervois Quay, some newly built in the 1890s, are also shown. The unusual circular shape shown beside Shed N traces the movement of the 35-ton hydraulic crane, made in Glasgow and erected on the edge of Jervois Quay by the harbour board in 1891 for loading and unloading ships. This was the rst of many cranes built on the wharf by the harbour board.13
The harbour board’s new 35-ton wharf crane on Queen’s Wharf, erected in 1891. This photograph was taken on its opening day during a test of the crane’s strength, watched by a large crowd. In the distance is Shed N. Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, NZG-18910613-0061-02
14 For more detail, see Catherine Hodder and Peter Hodder, Wellington’s Developing Infrastructure: SomeEarly History (Wellington: HodderBalog Publications, 2022), 73–89; J. E. Martin, People, Politics and Power Stations: Electric Power Generation in New Zealand, 1880–1990 (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books and Electricity Corporation of New Zealand, 1991); ‘New Zealand Electrical Syndicate Ltd’, New Zealand Mail, 3 January 1901, 24.
15 ‘Football match by the electric light’, New Zealand Mail, 7 June 1879, 20. From the reporting, it seems this was probably soccer, rather than rugby.
16 ‘The electric light’, New Zealand Mail, 19 July 1889, 9.
17 ‘On the electric lighting of Wellington’, quoted in Michael Fitzgerald, ‘Skey, William’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1993. Te Ara—the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt.nz/en/ biographies/2s29/skey-william
18 [Untitled], Evening Post, 10 October 1893, 2.
On Harris Street, another unusual shape drawn on the map is the octagonal footprint of the chimney of the New Zealand Electrical Syndicate’s electricity generation plant, alongside the Gülcher Electric Light and Power Company’s building.14 Wellington’s streets had been lit by gas lamps since the 1870s (on moonless nights only). Electric lighting had been tested in the same decade, including for illuminating a football match at the Basin Reserve, although this wasn’t very successful as the lights ickered and went out.15 The city council called for tenders to provide electric lighting in the city in 1888. The successful tenderer would need to build turbines and supply 500 electric lamps, and the council itself would provide the water for the hydroelectric scheme from its own town water supplies in Karori and Wainuiomata.
The winner of the tender was the Gülcher Electric Light and Power Company of London, which built two small brick hydroelectric stations, one on Manners Street on the Market Reserve (Sheet 34, which later became the Turkish Baths), and one on Panama Street behind the Government Life Insurance building (Sheet 27). Electric lights began shining on the streets of Wellington in 1889, the same year Ward began his project; they are marked as stars on his map. The city became the rst in the southern hemisphere to be lit with electric street lighting. The commemorative street light beside the Martin Fountain on Lambton Quay (mentioned in Sheet 26), donated by former mayor Samuel Brown, an early advocate of electric street lights, was the brightest in the city.
On the rst night, the New Zealand Mail described the scene:
Soon a er dusk, as far as the eye could see, street a er street was dotted suddenly with tiny glowing glints of light, resembling so many isolated knitting needles heated to a dull red heat. Then these gradually increased in depth of colour, passing from the dull, cherry red into a crimson-like ame, verging rapidly into the full, pure white blaze of electricity. Then the city was brilliantly lit.16
Wellington scientist William Skey, who also wrote poetry (described as o en ‘deliciously awful’ by his biographer), captured the moment in ‘On the electric lighting of Wellington’:
‘Tis done!
And where but yesterday night, the gas-lights are To strive for man against the murky air, To night from lo y shapes in trappings gay, The Empire City’s bathed in mellow day; To night a thousand suns resplendent shine, From Lambton’s curve to Newtown’s far con ne.17
However, the project struggled from its earliest days. The two hydro stations required more water than the council could provide without threatening supply to residents and factories. The Gülcher company’s contract and operations were taken over by the New Zealand Electrical Syndicate, also London-based, but which had a local board, headed by Charles Johnston, a member of the Legislative Council and a recent mayor of the city.
The syndicate applied for permission to supply private customers for the rst time; it supplied the power, and Gülcher wired up houses. In 1893, the operation moved to a new brick building on Harris Street, which burned coal from the West Coast landed nearby at Queen’s Wharf, creating steam to generate the electricity in a shi away from hydro power. Its tall, striped chimney became a city landmark.
When the governor, Lord Glasgow, and his wife visited the building just a er it opened, the turbines were set in motion for them to observe. They were also shown an ‘interesting collection’ of electrical appliances, including kettles, irons, frying pans, pots for boiling shaving water, curling tongs and fans, and a model electric workshop, including a lathe, drilling machine and grindstone, all driven by an electric motor. In 1899, the syndicate was given permission to expand its operations into the outer suburbs.18
The Harris Street electricity station, with its large brick chimney, c.1893. Wellington City Council Archives, 00281-1-6
19 ‘The New Zealand Electrical Syndicate’, New Zealand Mail, 3 January 1901, 24.
20 The Cyclopedia of New Zealand [Wellington Provincial District] (Wellington: The Cyclopedia Company, 1897), 487–89.
By 1901, most of the main central-city streets, and some of the side streets, were lit, and Parliament’s buildings, Government Buildings, most of the city’s shops and many of the factories were using electricity, including for li s and machinery, gradually transforming the manufacturing sector, which had previously relied on steam power.19 The city o en lit up its large buildings for special occasions. A er the council bought the Harris Street station in 1907 it was extended, including the addition of a new appliance showroom, and its chimney replaced. In 1903, the council also built a new power station with a huge chimney to generate power for the electric tramway on Jervois Quay; this was not completed in time to be shown on the map.
By the time Ward completed his map updates, around 1900, many of the blocks of reclaimed land on this map had been built on, with large three- and four-storey warehouses and similar buildings dominating (double lines show warehouses built of brick). Many stored goods newly arrived at Queen’s Wharf.
One of the large brick warehouses constructed during this era was the four-storey building of the rm Sharland and Co. on Willeston Street. Designed by the architect Frederick de Jersey Clere, its gas-powered li ran between the oors, and its entrance was large enough for carts to enter the building to be loaded up inside. The building stored drugs, patent medicines, chemicals and acids, including sulphur from the company’s own sulphur elds in the Bay of Plenty. Sharland’s also manufactured food and domestic products in this building, including baking powder, tomato and Worcestershire sauces, and vinegars.20
The streets in this area of the reclaimed land began to fill up in this decade with warehouses, usually with Classical ornamental features. This image was taken c.1901 from Jervois Quay and looks down Hunter Street towards Lambton Quay. On the right is the impressive curved premises of Sargood, Son & Ewen, suppliers of drapery and fancy goods. Two large dryads hold up the parapet. It was linked to Sargood’s second building along Hunter Street by an iron bridge on the first floor. At the far end of Hunter Steet are the columns of the Bank of New South Wales on Lambton Quay (Sheet 26). The young boys standing with their carts are presumably waiting for their next job hauling goods from place to place. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, O.031742
The Sharland and Co. building
Willeston Street in 1893 or 1894.
1/2-011660-G
on
Alexander Turnbull Library,
The warehouse of paper merchants A. Given and Co., designed by William Crichton, on the corner of Jervois Quay and Harris Street, in 1900. Bulleyment Fortune Architects archives, care of McKenzie Higham Architects
The very large E. W. Mills warehouse, topped with a lion, between Jervois Quay and Victoria Street, c.1901–02. Alexander Turnbull Library, PA1-o-516
