This book is about three adjoining Auckland suburbs — Grey Lynn, Arch Hill and Westmere — and the people who have lived here. As in all suburbs, their buildings and places have stories to tell, as two neighbouring houses, 10 and 12 Home Street in Arch Hill, exemplify. One, a modest cottage, is perched on a steep section at the corner of Home Street and Brisbane Street, its façade partly obscured by a picket fence above a retaining wall that appeared long after the house was built, in order to provide a level road and footpath. Its larger neighbour, while still modest, features a hip roof and narrow verandah. Both houses were built just inside the southwest boundary of the 3000-acre block of land that was gifted in 1840 by Ngāti Whātua for the new capital of the young colony, New Zealand. The acreage was initially cut up into town sections with suburban farms beyond.
The land where the houses stand was purchased from the Crown in 1844 by Thomas Poynton, an ex-convict who had arrived in New Zealand from Australia with his wife, Mary, in 1828 and set up a store and sawmill in the Hokianga. His property at Arch Hill was one of a number of suburban farms Poynton bought in the 1840s as he took advantage of a government scheme that allowed pre-Treaty land claimants in remote areas to swap their low-value properties for higher-value land in the growing town. This encouraged settlers to relocate to Auckland, where settlers were needed, while also removing them from areas where there was no colonial government presence to protect them or stop them getting into quarrels with local Māori.
Poynton didn’t ever settle the land, selling it in 1845 to butcher William Thorne Buckland. In 1853 it was bought by David Burn, who in 1859 subdivided it into residential sections, no doubt hoping to make a good profit. Close to the city, and relatively small, the sections were ideal for city workers. However, Burn was one of many vendors of newly subdivided land near the city, and with supply outstripping demand, it would be decades before his
land was all sold. The purchaser of the two adjoining sections fronting Home Street on the southwestern corner of Brisbane Street was Nathaniel Gow, a bootmaker who had recently arrived from Barrhead in Scotland with his wife Margaret and their eight children, and who, like many other plucky immigrants before and since, had made the decision to sail to the opposite side of the world, away from all they had ever known in the hope of building a better future for their family. They arrived in Auckland on the Ganges in 1863 and, not long after, Gow agreed to sell one section to William Baildon, an immigrant from Huddersfield. Evidently love was in the air; in 1867 William Baildon married Nathaniel and Margaret’s third daughter, Isabella, at the Gow residence.
Like many new Aucklanders, the young couple moved to Thames after gold was discovered there. They returned a few years later and Baildon, a builder, erected a house not far from his in-laws at the western end of Dean Street (then known as Stanley Street), where he and Isabella raised a family.
William Baildon and Nathaniel Gow were both active in local body politics, serving on the Arch Hill Highway Board as it struggled to build and maintain roads and keep the area in a sanitary condition. This was no easy task in the days before piped water and sewerage; local nuisances included stinking piles of manure and bloated horse carcasses abandoned on roadsides, resulting in letters from the highway board demanding residents clean up their mess. Keeping order and making improvements was difficult when there was limited rating revenue and where the hilly terrain meant that roads could often only be formed by digging away banks and filling in ditches by hand.
On Sundays the Baildons and Gows attended St James Presbyterian Church, a little over 2 kilometres away, on Wellington Street in Freemans Bay. From 1877 the children of both families attended nearby Newton West School, a one-room public school on Great North Road that also served a variety of community purposes, from meetings and church services to social events.
But there was another side to this suburb. William Crowe’s brothel in nearby Waima Street (then known as Oxford Street) disturbed the peace of the quiet neighbourhood in the 1870s and early 1880s, with one neighbour complaining that ‘midnight brawls and curious noises made night hideous, and banished sleep from the locality’. At the time the nearest police presence was the solecharge Newton Station in West Street (now West Terrace) off Karangahape Road. The fledgling police force generally left brothelkeepers and prostitutes to their own devices unless there was public misconduct or complaints from neighbours. Crowe’s establishment clearly attracted police attention, as did the larrikins who disrupted the peace of the neighbourhood by swearing, beating kerosene tins and vandalising property. By 1887 there was sufficient trouble in the district to warrant a police station, which was located in a rented house on the north side of Great North Road between Turakina and Ariki streets (then known as Tennyson and Princep streets).
Alcohol was the cause of many social ills, and the temperance movement grew strong in Arch Hill. In 1886 William Baildon stood as one of five temperance candidates for the Arch Hill Licensing District elections, pledging if elected to close the only hotel in the district. Although unsuccessful, he continued to support the temperance cause, and in the early twentieth century Grey Lynn electorate (including Arch Hill, Grey Lynn and Westmere) became the first North Island electorate to ban the sale of alcohol when the residents voted the district ‘dry’. It would remain so for much of the twentieth century; in 1996 it was one of the last areas to vote ‘wet’, ending one of the longest dry spells in New Zealand.
By the late 1880s the Baildon family was living on the south side of Great North Road between King and Bond streets, the ridge-top position giving magnificent views to the north across the vast Surrey Hills Estate and on to Coxs Creek, with the Waitemata Harbour and North Shore beyond.
Only a few houses dotted this landscape. Prominent features included the Warnock Brothers’ soap and candle works on the south side of Richmond Road, at the edge of Coxs Creek, and Hellaby’s slaughterhouse and meatworks on the coastal land beyond. To the northwest the distant chimney of the municipal abattoirs towered above Western Springs, where West View Road runs today. These were just some of the noxious industries that were no longer tolerated in the increasingly populous city and so were relocated to the open fields beyond.
But the view north from the Baildon’s ridge-top home would change. The belching chimneys were gradually overwritten by residential development that staggered, in fits and starts, across the landscape, and the evolution of less offensive industrial concerns that provided local jobs for residents.
William and Isabella Baildon’s eldest son, George, married Maggie Kerr in 1893 and the couple moved to a house (likely built by George with the help of his father) on the property adjoining the Gows’ in Home Street. Two years later George followed his father into local politics. He was elected to the Arch Hill Road Board and later the Grey Lynn Borough Council and Auckland City Council, and served as mayor of both Grey Lynn Borough and Auckland City councils. In the early twentieth century George and Maggie moved to Great North Road, at the western corner of Northland Street (then known as Northcote Street), where they would remain for the rest of their lives.
Subsequent residents of the former Baildon property at 12 Home Street included a tramways company employee who helped transport workers from the suburbs to city workplaces, something that had been part of the pattern of life in Grey Lynn and Arch Hill since 1903 when the first electric trams made their way along Great North Road, stirring up a cloud of dust in their wake.
In the 1940s Daisy and William Ellis made their home in the former Gow residence at 10 Home Street. During the Second World War William joined the Royal Air Force and flew missions over Germany. When the news came that he had been shot down Daisy was no doubt bereft. The Gows and Baildons knew the feeling — George Baildon had lost a brother and a son in the previous war.
From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the Baildons’ former home at 12 Home Street was the residence of the artist Theo Schoon, an immigrant of Dutch heritage who had grown up in Indonesia. At this time Arch Hill was home to several departments of the Elam School of Art, which had been relocated to the former Newton West School after fire destroyed part of the art school’s Symonds Street premises. The neighbourhood was becoming more culturally diverse than it had been in William Baildon’s time, and now included people from rural Māori communities and the Pacific Islands.
The government encouraged Pacific Islanders to come to New Zealand to ease the labour shortage, and many Pasifika peoples now made their homes in the increasingly rundown housing of the inner-west suburbs, including Arch Hill and Grey Lynn, where buying or renting were cheap and the commute into the city was relatively easy. In 1961 Niuean timber worker Langi Sipley bought the former Gow residence in Home Street; it would remain connected to the Sipley (Sipeli) family for almost 60 years.
The challenges of adapting to life in New Zealand were eased by the Pacific Island churches and their communities. Grey Lynn and Arch Hill were close to the Pacific Island Presbyterian Church in Newton, where people gathered to worship in their own languages. Other congregations gathered closer to home, raising funds for church buildings including the Sione Uesile (John Wesley) Samoan Methodist Church and community centre in King Street.
Local schools adapted to teaching children who were recent arrivals from the various island nations of the Pacific. Many spoke little or no English, so new methods evolved to help them learn.
Facing discrimination, young members of these communities banded together to support Polynesian people and fight racial prejudice, and formed the Polynesian Panthers, who first met in a house in Keppell Street, just a stone’s throw from the former Gow and Baildon residences in Home Street.
Auckland was growing, and better connections between west Auckland and the city were needed. Soon a thick ribbon of black asphalt worked its way along the Arch Hill gully, blanketing part of the Newton Central School playground, and by the late 1970s the hum of cars speeding along the new motorway was added to the sounds of the suburb. The industrial landscape also changed as light industry marched west from the Newton Road end of Arch Hill — many houses at this end of the district were demolished to make way for commercial buildings.
In 1977 Neil French, a car-yard manager, bought 12 Home Street and lived there for several years, and in 1987 the property was purchased by the Presbyterian Church and later became the home of Presbyterian minister Mua Strickson-Pua, who had grown up in Grey Lynn as the son of Samoan immigrants, and his wife Linda.
Through the closing decades of the twentieth century and into the twentyfirst, house prices in this part of the city rose dramatically. Many rundown rental properties were sold to owner-occupiers who renovated them, further increasing their value and the desirability of the area.
Well over a century has passed since the little houses at 10 and 12 Home Street were first built. Their survival has been remarkable, and they are a tangible reminder of the history of this part of the city and of the people who have lived here.
