The Village Green

An elevated westerly aspect of the village green at the south-west corner of the intersection of Wellington and Hepburn Streets, Freemans Bay, Auckland, New Zealand.  Sunday, 31st December, 2017.

There was a time when our village green was a swamp where waterfowl roamed amid marsh-misted reeds at the headwaters of a stream.  One hundred and seventy eight years ago the least affluent of the earliest European settlers came to this place to cut bull-rushes for the liveable huts they would construct nearby.  

By the beginning of the 1850s the stream was forded by a steep livestock track that led from David and Margaret Archibald's suburban farm on Franklin Road to the garrison towns' markets.  The first settler's cottage stood close to where a fashionable Japanese restaurant can now be seen just to the right of centre in the photograph.

By the mid 1860s the stream had been enclosed in a brick tunnel down to the lagoon at the far western side of Freemans Bay, where the last boat shed survives opposite the supermarket.  As the pressure of suburban in-fill increased six houses and three shops soon occupied the site of what is now the village green.

With its panoramic views of the city and the harbour Wellington Street West, as it was formerly known, was originally deemed to be in the suburb of Ponsonby, rather than industrial Freemans Bay, and thereby to nominally separate it from the city end of the street, with its pubs, boarding houses and brothels. 

Between 1878  and 1886 Auckland's population doubled and about a dozen shops; grocers, bakeries, a butcher, and a boot maker, etc. formed the centre of the village.  Suburban in-fill was complete by 1900 and remained more or less intact until 1970.  Diagonally opposite the green one the original grocer's shops survives as the iconic Rupa's Cafe.

From 1952 the territorial authority began acquiring much of the Freemans Bay area by compulsory purchase for residential redevelopment.  Demolition of the structures on the site of the village green took place from 1968 to 1974.  Formerly occupying the back garden of a cottage on Hepburn Street, only the gnarled tree to the Left of centre in the photograph survives from the early 1950s, all of the other trees in the image are less than forty years old.

Opposite the village green on Hepburn Street, new social housing was completed in 1965 (David Lange, sometime Prime Minister of New Zealand, lived here in his time as a Legal Aid lawyer at the Magistrate's Court). Gentrification of Freemans Bay began in 1970 with the completion of the Sheridan Square town-house development opposite on Wellington Street, and the eleven shops that adjoin the village green were built between 1974 and 1978.

The population of Freemans Bay peaked a century ago at 10,500, today it's somewhat less than half of that.  More than a million dollars is now required in order to acquire a bijou town-house in the vicinity of this village green that's within an easy walk to both the Paris end of town at Ponsonby and the centre of Auckland city.

Not trusting the fallibility of received history, the foregoing was mostly compiled from contemporary newspaper reports and 339 old photos.