Newmarket, New Zealand
Encyclopedia
Newmarket is an Auckland suburb
Suburb
The word suburb mostly refers to a residential area, either existing as part of a city or as a separate residential community within commuting distance of a city . Some suburbs have a degree of administrative autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods...

 to the south-east of the central business district
Central business district
A central business district is the commercial and often geographic heart of a city. In North America this part of a city is commonly referred to as "downtown" or "city center"...

. With its high building density, especially of retail shops, it is considered New Zealand's premier retailing area, and a rival of local competitor Auckland CBD
Auckland CBD
The Auckland CBD is the geographical and economic heart of the Auckland metropolitan area. Bounded by several major motorways and by the harbour coastline in the north, it is surrounded further out by mostly suburban areas...

. It is also considered the fashion capital of New Zealand.

While as early as 1873, Newmarket has been referred to as a 'suburb' of Auckland, in fact until the amalgamation of the borough
Borough
A borough is an administrative division in various countries. In principle, the term borough designates a self-governing township although, in practice, official use of the term varies widely....

 councils into Auckland City Council
Auckland City Council
Auckland City Council was the local government authority representing Auckland City, New Zealand, and was amalgamated into the Auckland Council on 1 November 2010. It was an elected body representing the 404,658 residents of the city...

 in 1989, local governance was by the Newmarket Borough Council, with its own Mayor. The borough, while one of the smallest in the Auckland Region
Auckland Region
The Auckland Region was one of the sixteen regions of New Zealand, named for the city of Auckland, the country's largest urban area. With one third of the nation's residents, it was by far the biggest population and economy of any region of New Zealand, but the second-smallest land area.On 1...

, was also one of the busiest. This is especially true of Broadway, the main street, which has large shopping centres and smaller retail tenancies (with a total of over 400 stores as of mid 2010), two movie theatres, and numerous restaurants, bars and cafés.

Maori beginnings

The Maori called this area as Te Ti Tutahi, 'the sacred cabbage tree standing alone', referring to a tree which stood on the corner of Mortimer Pass and Broadway until just after 1900. It is possible that some of the cabbage trees around Highwick are descended from this tree.

European settlement

The earliest subdivision of land in this location took place in June 1841. In 1842 Epsom Road was formed, running from the bottom of town up through Parnell towards the middle of the Auckland isthmus. This was later called Manukau Road before being given its current name, Parnell Road. At this time what is now Manukau Road was called the Onehunga Road.

In 1845 Khyber Pass Road was formed and the intersection of these three roads was called "Hobson's Bridge" referring to a small wooden bridge that crossed over "Hobson's creek" (more or less where the railway track passes near the Olympic Swimming Pool). A very small bridge was the most noteworthy landmark of the area, giving some idea of the rather empty nature of the landscape.

Around 1851 this area received the name Newmarket because it was the site of the 'New Market' for livestock. Farmers would drive their stock up the Manukau, Great South, or Remuera Roads to the market which was better situated than the earlier stock market in Auckland proper. The presence of the a local railway station
Newmarket Train Station, Auckland
Newmarket Train Station is located in the Auckland, New Zealand suburb of Newmarket, on the Southern and Western Lines of the Auckland railway network. Serving the busy commercial centre of Newmarket, the station is the second-busiest train station in Auckland, after Britomart...

 connecting it with Auckland, opened in 1873 after the completion of the first Parnell Tunnel
Parnell Tunnel
The Parnell Tunnel is a railway tunnel under Parnell, Auckland, New Zealand. It is long, and allows the Western and Southern lines coming from Newmarket Train Station to Britomart Transport Centre to pass under the Parnell Ridge before the line drops to harbour level...

, was also a great advantage. The market was located to the south of Remuera Road and east of Manukau Road.

Overlooking Newmarket on a bluff to the south east is a 19th Century wooden House in the Gothic style called Highwic. The home of a local businessman Alfred Buckland, Highwic is now owned by the Auckland City Council
Auckland City Council
Auckland City Council was the local government authority representing Auckland City, New Zealand, and was amalgamated into the Auckland Council on 1 November 2010. It was an elected body representing the 404,658 residents of the city...

 and administered by the New Zealand Historic Places Trust
New Zealand Historic Places Trust
The New Zealand Historic Places Trust is a non-profit trust that advocates for the protection of ancestral sites and heritage buildings in New Zealand...

. Another piece of Auckland land owned by Alfred Buckland located further out of town is still called "Bucklands Beach
Bucklands Beach
Bucklands Beach is a suburb 13 kilometres east of Auckland's CBD in New Zealand. The suburb is in the Howick ward, one of the thirteen administrative divisions of Auckland City, and under authority of the Auckland Council.-Maori:...

".

Thriving suburb

The main road of Newmarket is called Broadway, named apparently after the Broadway Cinema which opened in 1923 for silent films. The building was just a corrugated iron shed behind a modest facade and the cinema itself did not last very long, but the name stuck. Like its New York namesake, Newmarket's Broadway developed a rather bright 'Moderne
Streamline Moderne
Streamline Moderne, sometimes referred to by either name alone or as Art Moderne, was a late type of the Art Deco design style which emerged during the 1930s...

' flashy image in the 1930s & 1940s and by the 1960s had the biggest collection of neon signs in the country.

The Olympic Swimming Pool was constructed in 1939 to the designs of the borough engineer N. F. Alcock. This Art deco
Art Deco
Art deco , or deco, is an eclectic artistic and design style that began in Paris in the 1920s and flourished internationally throughout the 1930s, into the World War II era. The style influenced all areas of design, including architecture and interior design, industrial design, fashion and...

 building was opened by the Minister of Internal Affairs, the Hon William Parry in 1940. As well as being the borough's only public amenity the Olympic sized swimming pool was a great asset for the whole of Auckland. Over the years it has been well used and facilitated the hosting of many sporting events by Auckland including the Empire Games in 1950. Recently the pool's streamline art deco form was considerably changed when a cinema complex was built over the pool, which was previously open to the sky. To the north of the Olympic Swimming Pools is the Olympic Park War Memorial
War memorial
A war memorial is a building, monument, statue or other edifice to celebrate a war or victory, or to commemorate those who died or were injured in war.-Historic usage:...

.

Located to the south of the Olympic Pools is Lumsden Green. The Green occupies a triangle of land at the intersection of Parnell Road, Broadway and Khyber Pass which had been put aside as a reserve in 1878. The park is ornamented by a modernist fountain, a 19th century canon and a stainless steel sculpture by Marte Szirmay installed in 1969 to mark the Centenary of the Newmarket Highway district. The park is named in honour of David Lumsden, the last Mayor of Newmarket before amalgamation with Auckland City in 1989.

For much of the 20th century most road traffic leaving or entering Auckland passed through Newmarket. Leading off Broadway is the beginning of Remuera Road which is the way to the eastern suburbs while further south Broadway splits into Great South Road and the secondary southern route, Manukau Road. The constant flow of traffic only added to Newmarket's fast, modern image and helped a great deal with its prosperity. Around 1966, between 25,000-30,000 cars used the street per day.

A significant change to the skyline was the Newmarket Viaduct
Newmarket Viaduct
The Newmarket Viaduct, sometimes considered 'one of the most distinctive engineering features' of New Zealand, is a six-lane State highway viaduct in Auckland, the country's largest city. Carrying the Southern Motorway over the Newmarket suburb area southeast of the CBD of the city, the 700 m long...

 erected in 1966 to take one of the early sections of the Southern Motorway
Auckland Southern Motorway
The Auckland Southern Motorway is the major route south out of the Auckland Region of New Zealand. It is part of State Highway 1....

 over the railway and half a dozen streets. The new motorway system opened up the new industrial suburbs to the south such as Penrose
Penrose, New Zealand
Penrose is an industrial suburb in Auckland City, New Zealand. It is located to the southeast of the city centre, at a distance of about nine kilometres, between the suburbs of Oranga and Mount Wellington, and close to the Mangere Inlet, an arm of the Manukau Harbour...

, Mount Wellington etc. This resulted in much of the local industry moving out of Newmarket and along with it many of the working class people who lived in modest houses in the surrounding streets.

Since the 1960s Newmarket has been largely a retail destination, although a certain amount of light industry still existed in the surrounding streets, the most significant of which is the brewing trade. Ever since the 1840s Newmarket has been the location of several breweries. Water falling on nearby Mount Eden
Mount Eden
Mount Eden is the name of a cinder cone and surrounding suburb in Auckland City, New Zealand, situated five kilometres south of the city centre. The mountain is the highest natural point in the whole of Auckland...

 emerges in several reliable springs in the Khyber Pass area. Flowing through large amounts of volcanic scoria it is very well filtered. The Brewery buildings on Khyber Pass Road have been rebuilt but are still landmarks of the area.

Modern days

Newmarket has become the second shopping and specialty store centre of Auckland City, and also a main entertainment hub. At the same time, the location on one of the major throughfares into and out of the city also led to increasing bottleneck issues, with some claiming during the middle of the 2000s that Council was neglecting the area (though projects like the Central Connector
Central Connector, Auckland
The Central Connector , is a bus rapid transit link between Britomart Transport Centre in the Auckland CBD, New Zealand, and the commercial suburb of Newmarket. It is to improve journey times by about 14 minutes for around to 2,600 buses per week, about 65,000 passengers daily...

 are now (2007) aiming to alleviate this). Traffic gridlock was one of the reasons why a plan for a major new Westfield Group shopping centre near the railway line was hotly contested by the Newmarket Protection Society, a group composed mostly of residents and some local business owners. Partly due to these objections, Westfield later abandoned the plans and instead bought the Two Double Seven
Westfield 277 Newmarket
Two Double Seven is a medium sized shopping centre with upmarket shops located at 277 Broadway, in the Newmarket suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. It features a Foodtown, a nearby Farmers and about 60 speciality stores. In 2005, it had retail sales of NZ$120 million...

 shopping centre.

Traffic remains a major factor in the area, as Broadway carries over 40,000 vehicles a day, limiting the ability of pedestrians in the shopping district to cross the main road. An ambitious earlier plan from 2003 to construct a "road over rail" above the railway line, from the northwest end of Newmarket near Park Road, to the southeast near the St Marks Road interchange, did not go ahead, even though this could have significantly reduced vehicle traffic on Broadway. A late 2000s upgrade has however provided new high-quality bluestone
Bluestone
Bluestone is a cultural or commercial name for a number of dimension or building stone varieties, including:*a feldspathic sandstone in the U.S. and Canada;*limestone in the Shenandoah Valley in the U.S...

 footpaths along Broadway and some of the side-streets.

The Auckland Regional Council
Auckland Regional Council
The Auckland Regional Council was the regional council of the Auckland Region. Its predecessor the Auckland Regional Authority was formed in 1963 and became the ARC in 1989...

 has designated Newmarket as a 'strategic managed growth area' in the Regional Growth Strategy, meaning that high-density mixed use (residential and commercial) buildings are encouraged. This is to encourage areas in which work, living and entertainment can be achieved close to each other, limiting the average amount of [especially car-] traffic required every day. Good public transport connections are also considered to assist these policy goals. Partly due to the increasing attractiveness of living in the city, large apartment buildings are now increasingly springing up in the area, a process partly encouraged by Council via new planning rules. However, many of the apartment buildings that were created in the suburb in the 2000s have been heavily criticised, and termed clusters of "shoe boxes" or "rabbit hutches", for their small unit sizes and bland exterior.

Māori Television
Maori Television
Māori Television is a New Zealand TV station broadcasting programmes that make a significant contribution to the revitalisation of the Māori language and culture . Funded by the New Zealand Government, the station started broadcasting on 28 March 2004 from a base in Newmarket.Te Reo is the...

 Headquarters has been located in a building at the edge of Newmarket and Parnell
Parnell, New Zealand
Parnell is a suburb of Auckland, New Zealand. It is often billed as Auckland's "oldest suburb" since it dates from the earliest days of the European settlement of Auckland in 1841...

 since 2004.

In 2007, the Lion Brewery
Lion Nathan
Lion Nathan National Foods is the parent company created in October 2009, into which Lion Nathan and National Foods were merged. It is fully owned by Kirin Holdings Company, Limited...

 declared its intention to leave Newmarket in the mid-term and sold its 5ha site north of Khyber Pass Road for NZ$ 162 million. The area is likely to become a mixed-use development within the next half decade, marking "the end of Newmarket's industrial age", especially after of Hayes Metal Refineries Ltd, the other previously remaining industry, had also decided to move in 2008, after the owners had resisted development offers to be bought out in the 1980s.

Newmarket's shopping area's wireless CCTV system, a system cooperatively operated by the police and the Newmarket Business Association, has been described as "never having been done on this scale in a New Zealand town centre", and was credited partly for significant falls of some sorts of crime in Newmarket in recent (2009) years.

Railway history

Newmarket was once a centre of railway activity, with significant growth occurring after the rail line from the city was opened in 1873. Eventually, there was a junction station, two signal boxes, two railway workshop complexes, railway houses, a railway social hall and extensive goods yard. This changed in 1930 when the Newmarket Workshops
Newmarket Workshops
Newmarket Workshops in Auckland was a major New Zealand Railways Department facility, one of 13 workshops nationwide. It was one of two main railway workshops of Auckland, used mainly for maintenance; the older facility at Newmarket was replaced in 1929 by Otahuhu Workshops.- First Workshops :The...

 closed and were replaced by the Otahuhu Workshops
Otahuhu Workshops
Otahuhu railway workshops were a major rolling stock maintenance and repair facility of the New Zealand Government Railways Department, in the south Auckland suburb of Otahuhu in New Zealand's North Island...

. The Workshops bordering Broadway on the other side of the Remuera Road overbridge were torn down. The workshops along Middleton Road were retained and transferred to the New Zealand Post Office for use as Post Office workshops and these structures remained in place until they were unceremoniously torn down in the mid-1990s.

On 22 February 1955 the Railway Lodge No 196 of the Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes
Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes
The Royal Antediluvian Order of Buffaloes is a Fraternal, Benevolent and Social Organisation in the United Kingdom. It has no Royal patronage; it was founded after the Flood, it is not a recognised Order of chivalry and has no connection with buffaloes...

 was established in the Newmarket Railway Social Hall with a strong presence of over 100 brothers of the order, many of whom had connection with the railways. The Lodge continued to thrive for many years because of its link with the railways. The Railway Lodge 196 is a lodge of the New Zealand constitution of the Grand Lodge of England and continues to function, albeit in Ponsonby
Ponsonby, New Zealand
Ponsonby is an inner-city suburb of Auckland City located 2 km west of the Auckland CBD, in the North Island of New Zealand. The suburb is oriented along a ridge running north-south, which is followed by the main street of the suburb, Ponsonby Road....

, not Newmarket.

In the 1980s the Newmarket Railway Social Hall and many other railway buildings were demolished. By 1995 all that was left of Newmarket's railway heritage was the Fine Station, closed in 1983 and its signal box still manned, and one of the last in New Zealand to utilise the old style lever frame. The old workshop buildings on Middleton Road were demolished in that year. By the 21st century little remained of Newmarket's railway heritage other than the station, the signal box, a few items of preserved rolling stock and the Railway Lodge No 196.

Construction proceeded in 2008 on a new railway station and plaza on the northern side of Remuera Road overbridge, as a part of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority's upgrade of rail stations across the city. Designed by Opus International Consultants, the station will feature two concourses, multiple escalators, and open access to Broadway via a wide plaza. A footbridge will allow access to the station for pedestrians from Remuera Road. The station will be the second largest in New Zealand after Britomart.

Notable buildings

Due to redevelopment Newmarket has lost many of its buildings of historical significance.
  • Highwic circa 1863, Gillies Avenue, old homestead of Alfred Buckland; extant & open to the public - has been called one of Auckland's most notable historic houses, built in the Carpenter Gothic
    Carpenter Gothic
    Carpenter Gothic, also sometimes called Carpenter's Gothic, and Rural Gothic, is a North American architectural style-designation for an application of Gothic Revival architectural detailing and picturesque massing applied to wooden structures built by house-carpenters...

     style from an American pattern book.

  • Junction Hotel 1850s Cnr of Broadway, Great South & Manukau Roads demolished.

  • Newmarket Hotel 1850s, rebuilt 1920s Cnr Broadway & Morrow St demolished.

  • St Georges Hotel 1880s Broadway opposite Khyber Pass demolished.

  • Carlton Club 1890s corner of Broadway & Khyber Pass Road extant.

  • Former Newmarket Manual Training School 1903, Seccombes Rd, moved to this site from Mortimer Pass Road in 1925.

  • Captain Cook Brewery, 1870s - 1920s Khyber Pass road, demolished.

  • Newmarket Borough Council Chambers 1920s Broadway demolished.

  • Former Post Office, 1910, Broadway, John Campbell
    John Campbell (architect)
    John Campbell was an architect, responsible for many government buildings in New Zealand.Born in Scotland, he travelled to New Zealand in 1882 after training in Glasgow under John Gordon. From 1883 to his retirement in 1922 he worked for the government, holding the title of Government Architect...

    , altered.

  • Rialto Picture Theatre 1920s Broadway, Keith Draffin architect, altered.

  • St Peter's College and Christian Brothers House
    St Peter's College, Auckland
    St Peter's College is a Catholic college for year 7 to 13 boys . The school, located in Auckland, is one of the largest Catholic schools in New Zealand and is an integrated school under an integration agreement entered into by the Catholic Bishop of Auckland and the Government of New Zealand in...

    , 1939–1944, William Henry Gummer, architect
    Gummer and Ford
    Gummer and Ford was an architectural firm founded in 1923 in Auckland, New Zealand by William John Gummer and C. Reginald Ford. It was among the country's best-regarded architectural firm of the first half of the 20th century, designing numerous iconic buildings, including the former National Art...

    , extant.

  • Former Auckland Electric Power Board Building 1949 Remuera Road, Lew Piper architect. The top floor by J.I. Van Pels, was added in 1964. extant.

  • Newmarket Train Station
    Newmarket Train Station, Auckland
    Newmarket Train Station is located in the Auckland, New Zealand suburb of Newmarket, on the Southern and Western Lines of the Auckland railway network. Serving the busy commercial centre of Newmarket, the station is the second-busiest train station in Auckland, after Britomart...

    1908 George Troup
    George Troup (architect)
    Sir George Alexander Troup, CMG was a New Zealand architect, engineer and statesman. He was nicknamed "Gingerbread George" after his most famous design, the Dunedin Railway Station in the Flemish Renaissance style . He was the first official architect of the New Zealand Railways...

     architect. extant but removed to another location for safekeeping.

  • Former Jubilee Institute for the Blind, 1907 Edward Bartley
    Edward Bartley
    Edward Bartley was an architect from New Zealand. He was born in Saint Helier, Jersey, Channel Islands. He arrived in New Zealand 1854...

    architect, Parnell Road, now Parnell Public Library.

  • Olympic Swimming Pool 1939, N.F Alcock borough engineer, Parnell Road. heavily altered, now covered by a cinema and car park.

Further reading

  • The Heart of Colonial Auckland, 1865-1910. Terence Hodgson. Random Century NZ Ltd 1992.
  • Colonial Architecture In New Zealand. John Stacpoole. A.H & A.W Reed 1976
  • Decently And In Order, The Centennial History of the Auckland City Council. G.W.A Bush. Collins 1971.
  • Auckland Through A Victorian Lens. William Main. Millwood Press 1977.
  • The Changing Face Of Mount Eden. Faye M. Angelo. Mount Eden Borough Council. 1989.
  • Newmarket Borough Council Centenary 1885-1985, Kevin Male. Newmarket Borough Council 1985.
  • Newmarket, Lost and Found. Dinah Holman. Newmarket Business Association. Bush Press Of New Zealand 2001.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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