The Christchurch Morgue

There are no known specific photographs of the city morgue, but it does appear in sufficient elevated views of the area as to enable us to purvey the following diversion for assorted Goths and sundry others enjoying a proclivity to the taphophilic

The city's first purpose built morgue stood on the southeast corner of Manchester and Armagh Streets, where the 1939 Art Deco Municipal Electricity Department building now stands. It's successor, which probably dated from 1873, was accessed by a long cast-iron fenced and gated service lane on Montreal Street, which ran between the Canterbury Militia's parade ground on Cashel Street and the Hereford Street Police Station's 1865 accommodation barracks and stables.

Having something of the appearance of a small chapel and built of brick on a north-south axis, with a wooden shingle roof, there was a tall ornamented chimney on the northern wall, which faced Hereford Street. In what was a somewhat less appealing situation than the city's more salubrious locales, a porticoed entrance on the eastern wall faced the Police Station Lockup.

The morgue probably consisted of four rooms; a waiting room, post mortem room, a coroner's room and a special room for the reception of bodies. The coroner's and post mortem rooms would possibly have been connected by a glazed sliding door, which, in the case of a body being in an advanced state of decompositon, could be kept closed, and yet allow a jury be in a position to view the cadaver. With concrete floors and a plentiful water supply from the adjacent tank stand, the rooms for the reception of bodies and post mortems could be flushed out whenever required.

By 1907 the morgue's location had become the back garden of the Police Matron's residence and it could be likely that from about that time it was superseded by the morgue at the Christchurch Public Hospital. In 1970 the old morgue was designated as a garage on a survey map compiled before the demolitions on what had become the site of a large assortment of buildings, both big and small.

Since 1974 the whole site has been a car park for the central Police Station and the adjoining site of the 1905 King Edward Barracks has been a public car park since 1996. With the current redevelopment of the former Post Office sorting centre on Hereford Street as the new headquarters for the Christchurch City Council, it could be hoped that both car parks might be combined to form a piazza worthy of the reconstructed building that will face them.

Photo: a circa 1955 view, with the roof of the morgue to the foreground and the 1909 Police Sergeant's House, facing Hereford Street, in the background (and the extant 1930 St Elmo Courts in the distance).

19 February 1873

The original proposal for an Anglican cathedral for Christchurch called for an iron and glass structure along the lines of London's 1851 Crystal Palace Exhibition building. Regretfully, this design was abandoned in favour of a more conventional neo-Gothic structure in stone. Thus it was that the foundation stone of Christ Church Cathedral was laid on the 16th of December 1864, but by the following year construction plans had been halted as a consequence if inadequate funding.

On the 19th of February 1873 the Anglican Synod voted on a motion to sell the cathedral site to the Provincial Council for public offices, for the sum of £10,000.

An alternative site was proposed for a section of three and a half acres on Durham Street, between Gloucester and Armagh Streets, opposite the Provincial Council buildings. It was also suggested that economy could be effected by letting the frontages for building sites conditionally on the fronts of the houses erected thereon facing the Cathedral. If this were done, the Synod committee suggested that the Cathedral would stand upon the northern frontage of the land and the tower would be on Armagh Street.

The proposal was defeated by only one of the thirty-five votes and construction in Cathedral Square resumed in 1875, with the building being completed eight years later.

Christchurch 1961 Panorama

Since early August, 2008 the Christchurch City Libraries has been posting historic images on flickr.com. Among the most recent posts has been a sequence of undated photographs taken from the roof of the 1930, seven storey, St Elmo Courts, Art Deco apartment building in Hereford Street at the Montreal Street corner.

Above is an east-west partial panorama constructed from some of the Libraries' photographs.

To the extreme Left is the corner of Cambridge Terrace and Hereford Street, with the 1908 YMCA building on the site. Next to it (along Cambridge Terrace) can be seen the rear of the YMCA's Gordon Hall of 1885. To the Right of the Gordon Hall is a pale green two storey wooden building. Demolished in 1998, this was the 1940 headquarters of the NZ Army's Southern Military District. Clearly visible is the fire damaged roof of this building, which burnt in February, 1961.

Demolished in 1968, the 1908 YMCA building was replaced by the current Police Station in 1973. Along the range from Cambridge Terrace to Montreal Streets are the buildings of the 1863 Police Barracks and the 1873 & 1906 Police Stations. These were progressively demolished between 1973 and 1984 for a car park. At the corner of Montreal Street is the 1909 residence of the Chief Inspector of Police.

Between Montreal Street and Rolleston Avenue is a range of houses dating from circa 1880-1900. The most conspicuous of these is the vastly expanded Hereford Private Hotel ($10 a night and $1.50 for breakfast in 1984).

To the Right are the buildings of Canterbury University (now the Arts Centre). In the foreground can be seen the former 1883 Llanmaes House, subsequently the Student Union building from 1929, it is now the Dux de Lux Restaurant & Bar.

Christchurch Police Stations 1873 & 1906

Large image opens in a new window

Top Left: 1906 Police Station. Top far Right: 1873 Police Station

Bottom: Westerly panorama of Hereford Street West showing the building site of the 1973 Police Station at the Cambridge Terrace corner and the extant St Elmo Courts at the far Right.

A permanent, stone police station was built on Hereford Street in 1873 and first occupied in 1874. It consisted of two stone buildings separated by a yard with a lock-up situated back from the street (far Left in the lower image).

In 1906, in anticipation of the crowds expected to flock to the planned Exhibition, a new brick barracks and office building was built along the Hereford Street frontage, joining the two stone buildings.

Both the YMCA and the Eastern end of the building were demolished in 1968 to allow the new high-rise police station to be built on the corner of Hereford Street and Cambridge Terrace. After this building was completed in 1973, the rest of the old building was cleared away.


View a larger map in a new window

Friendship House goes East

Now remembered only by Christwegian grandparents was the Sunday night Teenage Coffee Club in the Methodist Central Mission's Friendship House on Cambridge Terrace between Colombo and Manchester Streets.

The adjacent Church bought the late 1880s house in 1961 and opened the club the following year. By the late 1980s it had become the Cleopatra's on Avon restaurant. Now sporting a most exotic interior the old building is partially obscured by the facade of the Indochine restaurant, as it is now known.

To the Right in the earlier photo is the 1873 Primitive Methodist Church, destroyed by arson in 1981.

---

The house to the Left at 207 Cambridge Terrace was probably built about 1873 on to the front of an earlier two-roomed cottage. It first enters the photographic record in 1878 and the porch was a later addition.

Demolished in 1965 it was replaced by the commercial photographic studios of Mannering and Associates Ltd. Subsequently the premises of Diederik van Heyningen's Lightworkx Photography, in 2008 it's the design studio of Sons & co.

The Mystery of the Timaru Bottle Dump

The mystery of the bottle dump on the site of the original Timaru court building may have been solved, possibly proving it wasn't a case of court staff being fond of a drink or two.

Archaeologist Kiri Petersen has been checking out the Heaton Street site prior to work on a new courthouse beginning and located a pit containing hundreds of bottles dating back to the 1870s.

The site was probably that used by a bottling factory for five or six years in the 1870s-1880s, according to South Canterbury amateur historian Jeremy Sutherland who has researched the history of South Canterbury breweries and bottling companies.

He suspects Mrs Petersen had located an area where the bottling company dumped its broken or unusable bottles.

The Alton Brewery began production in 1873 on the site now occupied by the Countdown supermarket. It later became the New Zealand Breweries and operated through to the mid 1970s.

Mr Sutherland said it was possible the bottling company had bottled both beer from the neighbouring brewery as well as bottling aerated drinks.

He noted virtually all the torpedo shaped bottles recovered were damaged, which supported his view it was the dump of a commercial operation. The bottles could either have been broken by youngsters attempting to get the marble out, or the glass might have gone cloudy making it unsuitable to be reused.

Mr Sutherland said it was common for brewing and bottling companies to dump bottles on site. When the nearby brewery site was cleared 12 years ago, three old wells were located. Each had been filled in using bottles and other rubbish.

The Timaru Herald, Thursday, 07 February 2008