Source: Radio New Zealand
View of 1860s Wellington showing the northern end of Lambton Quay at Pipitea. The intersection with Charlotte Street (now Molesworth Street) is near the centre of the image. Wellington City Libraries
Parliament’s grounds in Wellington are a knoll of relative peace in a dense governmental zone that includes cathedrals, courts, the National Archives and National Library, university schools and numerous government office blocks.
Imaging how it once was is not easy.
Elizabeth Cox is the author of Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street , which uses an astoundingly detailed 1890s map of Wellington to anchor details of life in the Victorian city. It is a beautiful and fascinating insight into the early and often ugly days of Wellington.
The House chatted with Cox about what the Parliamentary neighbourhood was like in the 1890s. You can hear the conversation at the link above, and read a little about that and earlier times below.
To set the scene, let’s first go back in time just a few decades further.
Pre-colonial Wellington
Before Europeans flooded in, Pipitea (where Parliament is now) was close to the sea, looking down on mudflats and streams that wended down from Tinakori Hill. The area was a centre of Māori habitation and food production.
Parliament’s own little hill had ponds and two creeks running down to a small beach, just a stone’s throw away.
The stream’s Māori names are not appealing. Waipiro stream (meaning putrid, stinking water) ran right through where Parliament House now stands.
Tutaenui stream (great amounts of excrement) ran down what is now Bowen Street (alongside the Beehive). Make of that what you will.
The hill rises up along Molesworth Street. It was known as Kaiota (unripe, food of dubious quality).
The pallisaded Pipitea Pā was a block or so east of Parliament, alongside the Pipitea stream. The pā had been established in the 1820s by Ngāti Mutunga, but by 1840, was occupied by Te Ātiawa, who had been pushed south out of Taranaki by the expansion of Waikato tribes.
A 2021 cultural impact assessment for a new Tenths Trust office development on Molesworth Street noted “the pā extended over much of the flat known as Haukawakawa [later Thorndon Flat] with extensive gardens spreading to what is now Parliament grounds and up to what is now the Wellington Botanic Garden. Ngāti Tama and Ngāti Mutunga also had kāinga/villages at Tiakiwai [now off 191 Thorndon Quay] and Raurima, near the corner of Hobson Street and Fitzherbert Terrace”.
There were also kāinga at Kumutoto stream, which is now Woodward Street off Lambton Quay.
When the somewhat unscrupulous rake Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Wellington Company sold off parcels of Wellington it didn’t really own, he took some prime acres for himself – including on the beach at the far northern end of Lambton Quay, and between Hobson Street and the beach at Thorndon Quay (about where the Australian High Commission is now).
The small hill the Beehive sits on was set aside by the Wellington Company for government. This was the centre of things, where they put the provincial government, and later the governors’ house.
Nowadays, the area is the seat of Parliament and government.
Government House in Pipitea with Ahumairangi Hill in the background. Photo circa 1890s. The Beehive now stands where Government House was. Wellington City Library
Mr Ward’s map
Fifty years after 1840, almost everything about Wellington had changed radically. The coastline had been pushed back a few blocks through reclamation, the beaches were gone, streams were culverted, the forested hills were bald, and peppered with sheep and cattle, and both Europeans and buildings were thick on the ground.
The city had already spread through Newtown, and was stretching rapidly into Berhampore and Kilbirnie.
Cox met me at Parliament to wander the area and imagine what Parliament’s neighbourhood was like by the 1890s. There was a lot to take in.
We know a lot about Victorian Wellington because of an outrageously detailed map drawn by Thomas Ward.
“Thomas Ward was a surveyor and an engineer,” says Cox. “He approached the city council to say, ‘How about I make a map for you?’, because he was disgusted by the quality of all the maps that were around Wellington at the time.
“Originally, he was just going to draw the town acres and the subdivisions and the roads, but about four months later, he approached the council again and said, ‘I’ve had this fabulous idea, how about I draw all the buildings as well?’, so he drew every single building in Wellington.
“Every outbuilding, every outdoor toilet, every shed, every commercial building, every house and then he went further. He also told us what the walls of every building were made of, what the roof was, and then how many rooms every house had and how many floors there were, but it’s even more valuable, because for the next 10 years, he was updating the map.”
That map, and its additions and annotations are a treasure trove for historians and anyone vaguely curious about the past.
Victorian Pipitea and Parliament
Inside Parliament’s own boundaries, only one building from the period remains – the Parliamentary Library, opened in 1899 and built in part with bricks made by prisoners at the Mount Cook Jail (on the current site of Wellington High School).
The building’s plan was downsized halfway through construction in an effort to save money. As a result, architect Thomas Turnbull demanded his name be removed from the foundation stone.
There are two statues in Parliament grounds. Both are of premiers who died in office – John Ballance and Richard Seddon.
Seddon was a racist, sexist, populist and popular politician, who lived just up Molesworth Street, after spurning Premier House. His influence on Parliament and its neighbourhood was strong.
The wooden Parliament buildings in 1873. Previously they had been the Provincial Council Chambers. Some were demolished without permission by Richard Seddon and the rest burned down. Wellington City Library
The library building was built after Seddon demolished part of the former provincial chamber without first asking permission from the MPs. Within eight years, the wooden buildings on either side had also burned down, leaving just the library.
The current marble edifice known as Parliament House was constructed during World War I and it too was downsized during construction, when money ran short.
In the 1890s, Sydney Street ran right across Parliament’s lawn and through the space that is now Parliament House. It began at Thorndon Quay and joined up with what is now upper Bowen Street, towards Tinakori Road.
It was later cut in half and renamed.
The Charlotte Street Entrance to Government House during the 1890s. Wellington City Library
The southern side of Sydney Street, where the Beehive now is, was not part of Parliament. Government House, where the governor lived with his family and staff was “an incredibly public place to live”, says Cox.
“The wives and kids and staff would wander around in the garden, and kind of be on public display.”
The Governors were all minor English nobility sent to administer the colonies. They weren’t always keen to be here.
Lord Onslow arrived in the middle of one of Wellington’s regular typhoid epidemics (spread via poor sewerage). After his eldest son and an aide-de-camp fell ill, the family made themselves largely absent and their snub made them unpopular.
New Zealand didn’t have a locally born governor general until Arthur Porritt in 1967. (The title changed from governor to governor general in 1917).
Governors general now live in relative seclusion in Mount Cook, near the Basin Reserve, on grounds that Ward’s map marked as reserved for an “asylum”. Make of that what you will as well.
An area of Thomas Ward’s map that includes the 1890s Parliament (bottom left), and parts of Hill St, Molesworth St, and the edge of the densely packed “slum” area between Parliament and the Anglican Cathedral. WCC / Thomas Ward
The Pipitea neighbourhood
To the north of Parliament is Hill Street, which now has two competing cathedrals, cheek by jowl. The Anglicans arrived later, but Catholics were already there in 1890 (although their first cathedral burned down in 1898).
Alongside the cathedral was a convent, a presbytery, a residence for priests and a fee-paying academic girls school. The Sisters of Mercy also ran the large St Joseph’s Orphanage and Industrial School.
The word ‘school’ is a misnomer.
“It was not a very pleasant place at all, I should think,” says Cox. “It was sort of like an orphanage, but you didn’t necessarily have to have your parents [die] to end up there.
“Sometimes, if your mother just wasn’t coping or if your father left the family, and… your mother couldn’t afford to look after you, they would take your children off you and put you in one of these industrial schools. Even from seven-years-old, they were learning how to work, they were learning how to knit and sew to become good wives and good domestic servants.
“It was a lot of focus on training them up to be domestic servants.”
Behind Parliament is Museum Street, named because, at the time, it was the location for the national Colonial Museum. It was set up by James Hector in 1965, as a reference museum of New Zealand’s natural history, geology and mineral resources.
Hector was then director of the Colonial Survey. He was also chief scientist, head meteorologist and looked after the botanical garden, ran the precursor to the Royal Society and was the university chancellor as well.
Cox reports that, as it was a reference museum, there are descriptions of it as “being an incredibly boring place to visit” and that was in spite of there being “massive whale skeletons hanging up and stuff like that”.
To the east of Parliament is Molesworth Street, which runs down a gentle slope to what was once the beach at Lambton Quay. It has a few shops and apartments today, but is busy with government buildings.
In the 1890s, it was “lined with small shops, commercial buildings and businesses, including herbalists, drapers, bootmakers, coal dealers, fishmongers, a horse bazaar, butchers, a dairy selling milk, cabinet makers and a number of Chinese fruit sellers. Many shop owners lived above their shops”.
The Provincial Hotel on the corner of Molesworth Street and narrow Fraser Lane. Wellington City Library
Behind the shops on the eastern side was a dense neighbourhood of tiny dwellings, described at the time as a “rookery” and, as the Evening Post described it then, “a hotbed of vice, a place where people of the most depraved character flaunted themselves in broad daylight”.
That densely packed slum was sandwiched between Parliament and the then-Anglican Cathedral (now Old St. Paul’s on Musgrave). On the Anglican side was Thorndon Flat, where the wealthy lived along Musgrave and Hobson streets.
“There were lots of very unkind jokes about how convenient it was that for all these prostitutes that they were living between the Anglican Cathedral and Parliament, how handy it was,” says Cox.
The community of tiny lanes and smaller houses was more than a slum. It included the poor, working single women and ethnic communities.
“There was a really interesting mix of people living in those blocks,” says Cox. She notes one example.
“At the time, they were often called in the newspaper ‘Syrians’, but they were actually Lebanese Christians. There’s a quite wellknown Lebanese Christian community that lived in Dunedin [at that time], but I found a whole group of them living here in this poverty stricken area.
“[Another] group of people that were living there were lots and lots of prostitutes, there were lots of brothels. Ward, as well as drawing the massive great big parliament buildings, he would come along and actually draw every single tiny little house.
“He would draw a two-roomed house – not two bedrooms, but two rooms in total – and its outdoor toilet and everything, so you could see how incredibly packed those blocks were.”
Those lanes no longer exist. The poor were chased away and their homes demolished, with no plan for where they might go instead.
“The city, particularly under pressure from Seddon… started to do this thing called ‘street widening’, which was sort of a euphemism for pulling all the buildings down. They built Aitken Street and a whole bunch of the other streets around here in order to justify pulling down those slums.”
Elizabeth Cox, historian and author of Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street. Supplied
Reading Elizabeth Cox’s engrossing Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street and pouring over its detailed maps, you might notice mirrors for modern news, some eerily specific and others just typically human.
Government buildings demolished by populist leaders without permission, developers naming things after themselves and their families, landmarks named for questionable people, fly-tippers, crazy fads, bad housing, poor planning, suburban development across the most productive land, and a failing city sewerage system and resultant disease… and they say history never repeats.
All the tragedy, comedy, glory and absurdity of a city. A marvellous read.
You can find out more about Elizabeth Cox’s book here and here.
You can compare Thomas Ward’s 1890s map to present day Wellington at the Council’s Historic Map Viewer.
You can read about Parliament’s own history here.
Book cover for Mr Ward’s Map: Victorian Wellington Street by Street. Supplied
*RNZ’s The House, with insights into Parliament, legislation and issues, is made with funding from Parliament’s Office of the Clerk. Enjoy our articles or podcast at RNZ.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand