The Village Green Revisited

The communal centre of the village of Freemans Bay at Auckland, New Zealand, from a pair of aerial photographs, dated to the 18th of February,1954 and the 5th of July,1979.

Known to bureaucracy as the Pratt Street Block in the time of the earlier image, the area is enclosed by Wellington, Hepburn, Anglesea and Collingwood Streets.

Pratt Street Block 1974

Subjected to compulsory purchase orders all of the properties within the block (with a few exceptions in the South-west corner) were cleared of all structures, the site was extensively landscaped using bulldozers and Pratt Street became a cul-de-sac culminating in a pedestrian entrance to an internal square of beguiling sylvan beauty (below).

The 1979 image was taken shortly after the completion of the Community Hall (1), the Kindergarten (2), the shopping centre (3) and the first and largest of the three apartment blocks (4)

Much is knowable about the people who have lived here, from the time when the first cottage (5) overlooked a swamp at the bottom of its backyard.

For instance the eight-room, two story Grocery shop at the corner of Wellington and Pratt Streets (6) first appears in the photographic record in 1881.  By 1908 it belonged to a widow, Ellen Wilkins also owned the two-room cottage next door and the pair of two storied town-houses beyond that.  Mrs Wilkins sold her shop in 1920 and was succeeded by the Francis, Emmerton, Barchard, Jeffs and Rupa families until it was demolished in 1968.

Or Richard and Esther Poulgrain of 18 Pratt Street (7).  Born in 1851, the proprietor of the Vulcan Ironworks in Albert Street, raised eight children in what had begun as a simple two-room cottage in 1873.

Both the widow Wilkins' shop and the Poulgrain's cottage would make way for the 30 apartment Wellington Court building (4).  Completed as social housing in April 1979 for $440,099, the territorial authority sold the freeholds of most of the apartments between 1997 and 1999.  And so it came to pass that within four decades these handy little pied-à-terres would be changing hands at around 40 times their initial cost.