1903 Horse Bazaar For Sale

Facing on to Lichfield & Madras Streets and Bedford Row, Harry Matson's 1903 Horse Bazaar is on the market for about $1.7million.

Harry's grandad had founded Henry Matson & Co Ltd in 1862 as Auctioneers, Stock and Station Agents, Wool Brokers, Grain and Produce Merchants but by the time that the horse auction premises were built, most the company's business was being conducted at the Addington Saleyards. Alas Henry junior failed to anticipate that the demand for horses would wane as mechanised transport became increasingly ubiquitous. But situated at the heart of the city's wholesale produce markets, the former bazaar soon became the auction rooms of the produce merchants Davis Trading Company Ltd.

The wholesale produce market eventually moved from the central city and the old auction rooms went into decline, being subsequently used for storage, with the mezzanine occupied as an artist's studio, but in the 1990s the building succumbed to a fire, remaining derelict until 2000, when Peter Beyere renovated the building, with a Christchurch City Council grant, as a café-bar style cabaret dance hall called Maximillian.

Later known as the Legends Bar and more recently as The Bedford, the current lease will terminate in November 2010. The 937 square metre building is now owned by property investor and developer Simon Henry, who trades as Rapaki Properties. Mr Henry is selling his 15 Christchurch properties to concentrate on Auckland industrial property.

Further reading:

TradeMe sale advertisment

Rapaki getting out of town, The Press 16 June 2009

2009 Heritage Grants Illustrated

On Friday, the 5th of June the Christchurch City Council issued a press release announcing the Heritage Grants and Covenants Committee's grants for 2009. We illustrate and quote from that media statement. Our editorial comments are in blue.


Just over $27,000 has been granted for conservation work on Acland House. The house was built around 1893 and was named after the Chairman of the school board when the hostel was established in 1921. The building is a group three listed building in the City Plan.

Situated at 85 Papanui Road, Merivale, and renamed to commemorate Sir Hugh Thomas Dyke Acland (1874-1956), the house is a residential facility for approximately 90 Christchurch Girls' High School pupils.

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The committee has granted $3,500 to install protective glass in a cell at Addington Prison to cover sketches done by inmates. Addington Prison was built to relieve congestion at the Lyttelton Gaol, the City’s first and only penal institution at the time. It is a good example of a Victorian jail and was constructed in 1872. The jail is also of significance for its connection to Edward Seager, who was Canterbury’s first police sergeant, Addington Gaol’s first gaoler, and Sunnyside Hospital’s first warden. The grant follows an earlier one, made in June last year, of $50,000 for internal and external maintenance and restoration work.

Built to the neo-Gothic design of the Architect Benjamin Mountfort in 1874, the building replaced an earlier prison in Armagh Street. Closed in 1999, the original cell block has been a Backpacker's Hostel since 2006.

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A grant of nearly $8,000 will be used towards repainting the exterior of the Highpara Apartment building in High Street. The three storey building is one of a number of listed premises on High Street that contribute significantly to the streetscape of this inner city precinct. In the 1980s the first and second floors of the building were converted to residential use, providing 27 warehouse-style apartments.

Built in 1884 as a block of retail premises, the current name derives from the Para Rubber Company having been a long term tenant of the corner shop.

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BEFORE

AFTER

A commercial building at 68 Manchester has attracted a grant of just over $8,000. The two storey, group-three-listed building was designed by Samuel Farr in 1877 and is one of a number of listed buildings on Manchester Street that contribute to the low-rise classical streetscape of the area.

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A grant of $26,000 has been allocated to work on a Cunningham Terrace, Lyttelton, house. The house is an early colonial dwelling built in 1874 for Peter Cunningham, a landowner and grain exporter who was a founder member of the Lyttelton Harbour Board and an original shareholder in the Canterbury Club. The house is an elegant two storey triple gabled timber dwelling with decorative finials and bargeboards. The grant will be used for replacing the roof, exterior painting, and replacing rotted timber.

Purchased from the Honourable John Thomas Peacock, Peter Cunningham was the owner of Peacock's Wharf, over which his house enjoyed a commanding view. Now much enlarged, and the dock for the inter-island RoRo cargo ferries, the port's second jetty is more prosaically renamed as No 7 Wharf.

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The Piko Wholefoods building at 229 Kilmore Street is a two storey brick building built in 1905. A grant of $10,000 will be used for maintenance on the brick, stone and timber work.

Originally the retail premises of a Painter and Paperhanger, the upper floor was first occupied by James Wyn Irwin, promoter of the Shorthand dictation method and Australasian representative of The Gregg Correspondence School. The building has been occupied by the Piko Wholefoods Coöperative since 1981.

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A grant of nearly $6,000 has been approved for work on the Cashmere Hills Presbyterian Church at 2 Macmillan Avenue. The church was designed by Cecil Wood in 1926 and built in 1929 of Port Hills basalt with a slate roof. A substantial amount of the grant will be used towards restoration of five stained glass windows and installation of protective glass shields to the north and east facing windows.

Lyttelton 1855

LARGE IMAGE OPENS IN A NEW WINDOW

This is a restoration of the earliest known photograph of Lyttelton. Dated 1855, it is view down Canterbury Street from the north-east corner of the intersection at London Street. Taken from the immediate vicinity of what is now the site of the Volcano Cafe, it shows what was then the main shopping street of the early port. The conflaguration of 1870 cleared the way for the horizontal London Street to replace Canterbury Street in that respect.

Viewed from the south-west corner of London Street are:

Armitage Brothers's Butchery

William Pratt's Drapery and General store. Pratt subsequently sold out to the Baker and Confectioner Thomas Gee (this photograph comes from the collection of Gee's Grandson, Alfred Selwyn Bruce). William Pratt went on to found the Christchurch store that became Ballantynes.

The front fence of the house of Henry William Reid. A Dr. McCheyne lost his life by falling down the (extant) entrance steps behind the gate.

Unknown shop.

Samuel Gundry's hardware store

Mrs Coe's Drapery shop

The Livery Stables of Thomas Bruce and Coe (the aforementioned Alfred Selwyn Bruce (1866-1936) was the son of Thomas Bruce (1826-1887) and his wife Ellen, formerly Gee (1833-1928).

The first Mitre hotel on the corner of Norwich Quay, opened by Major Hornbrook in 1849 and destroyed by fire in 1870.

Christchurch: Warner's Hotel Restoration

The main block of Warner's Hotel was built in 1900, but 17 years later the Left hand third was demolished to make way for a cinema (below), which was in turn demolished in 1996. As part of a high-rise hotel development on the site the original neo-classic facade is now being restored.

The Liberty Cinema, 1930

98 Year-Old Christchurch Tram

Built by Joseph Kitson Boon (1844-1935) at his surviving carriage works in Lower High Street (now Ferry Road), the tram entered service on the 9th of June 1910.

12.37 metres long and weighing about 15 tons, it's powered by two 600 Volt (DC) forty horsepower electric motors.


Withdrawn from service in 1952, the tram became a garden shed at South New Brighton. Rescued in August, 1969 (above), 23,000 man-hours of restoration were required before the project was completed in 1981.


The forty-eight passenger double-saloon car returned to service on the 4th of February, 1995.

1860 Christchurch 360° Panorama

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A previously unassembled panorama compiled from nineteen restored photographs taken between late 1859 and early 1861.

Taken from the tower of the Canterbury Provincial Council buildings in Armagh Street, near the Avon River, most are attributed to Alfred Barker (1819-1873), the balance probably being the work of Benjamin Mountfort (1825-1898), Barker's photographic tutor.

The Avon River winds through the panorama. In front of where the Town Hall is now situated can be seen the original lagoon where small steamers turned before mooring at a wharf behind where the Oxford Hotel now stands (the hotel site is still occupied by the original Māori hostel in this photograph). Occupying a wind swept, swampy floodplain, the city would be inundated eight years later, when the Avon rose to metre above Victoria Square and destroyed the Worcester Street bridge.

To the right can be seen the 1857 windmill of William Wood (1824-1904) at the corner of Antigua and St Asaph Streets. A distinctive landmark for distant travelers slogging their way through the swamp and tussock that surrounded the town, it was visible as far as 80 Km away.

Other than the Canterbury Provincial Council building only two other visible structures have survived. They are the circa 1859 John Shand (1805-1874) house in Hereford Street (now known as Shand's Emporium) and the 1857 Cookham House in Colombo Street. Now known as Sergeant Pepper's Steak House, it was originally the premises of the merchant George Gould (1823-1889), who lived upstairs, with his family.

See from where this panorama was taken.

Avebury, Richmond, 1972

Designed by James Glanville (1841-1913), a builder of St Asaph Street, who doubled as an architect, Avebury was built in 1885 for James Flesher, O.B.E. (1865-1930), a Solicitor and Mayor of Christchurch 1923-25.

Originally standing on twenty five acres, after Flesher’s death it passed to his son Herbert, who sold the house and eight acres to the Crown in 1945. Six years later the house and land were acquired by the Christchurch City Council for recreational use.

The house became the Cora Wilding Youth Hostel in 1965 and the land was established as Avebury Park. In 1997 the hostel closed and Avebury faced demolition.

Restoration began in 2000 and two years later Prime Minister Helen Clark opened the rejuvenated building as the Avebury House Community Centre.

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In 1899 James Glanville designed the extant, but now relocated, Leinster House for Andrew Fuller Carey (1863-1937), a partner in the Drapery of Tonycliffe and Carey at the northeast corner of Colombo and Gloucester Streets. 

Originally situated on the corner of Papanui and Leinster Roads at Merivale, Leinster House bears a strong resemblance to Glanville's earlier dwelling for James Flesher.

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Also in James Glanville's American influenced architectural style were a pair of houses on the eastern side of Latimer Square, between Worcester and Gloucester Streets. Demolished between 1973 and 1990, the sites of these large dwellings are occupied in 2008 by townhouses and an extension to the Latimer Lodge Motel.

Bonnington House Restoration

Begun in December 2006 the restoration by the KPI Rothschild Property Group of the 1883 Bonnington House on Christchurch's High Street is nearing completion.

George Bonnington (1836-1901) opened his first Chemist shop in 1854, the pharmacy closed 120 years later, but more than a century and a half after its invention Bonnington's Irish Moss Cough Mixture is still manufactured by the Glaxo Smith Kline company.

This is an image of the interpretive display prepared by Canterbury Heritage for the foyer of the restored building.

Satellite view of the building's location

The 1874 Barque James Craig

Launched in 1874 as the Clan Macleod, the vessel began her career on the South America run, subsequently carrying British emigrants to Australia. However, within a decade her kind had been superseded by steamers that didn't require three to four months for a voyage to the Antipodes.

As a New York based general cargo vessel she became a familiar sight at Canterbury ports from the later 1880s. Much of the enameled Granite Ware saucepans, pie dishes and kettles, etc. now keenly sought by antique collectors, arrived in the province via Cape Horn aboard the Clan Macleod.

Acquired by the Craig Line of Auckland at the turn of the century and renamed James Craig five years later, she worked the Tasman carrying timber to Australia, returning with hardwood railway sleepers and general cargo.

Sold to Sydney in 1911, she ended her working career as a Tasmanian coal hulk. Rescued in 1973, restoration began in 1981 and the vessel is once again registered at Sydney. Although still bearing the James Craig name, the $12.5 million "restoration" has not included the distinctive Craig Line livery.

The Craig Line's Louisa Craig of 1876 ended her career as the Lyttelton coal hulk Raupo and now lies beached on Quail Island.

Fourth in a series about surviving ships of significance to Canterbury history.

1863 Emigrant Ship Euterpe

Euterpe at Lyttelton in 1877, London Street in the foreground.
The Shaw, Savill & Company's Euterpe brought many thousands of emigrants to Canterbury between 1871 and 1896. The Eastward voyages from England took between 100 and 143 days.

Built in 1863 on the Isle of Man, she was renamed Star of India in 1906. Listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the world's oldest active ship, her home port is now San Diego.

Second in a series about surviving ships of significance to Canterbury history.

Public Trust Building Restoration

Currently undergoing a comprehensive restoration by Ben Gough's Tailorspace Investments is the 1924 Public Trust Building at 152-156 Oxford Terrace (between Worcester and Hereford Streets). There were plans to build a tower behind the building, but that's been scrapped.

Featuring a Takaka Marble and Black Granite interior, the Cecil Wood (1878–1947) design is a synthesis of post-Edwardian modernism and restrained classicism.

Under the supervision of a British expert in the restoration of heritage buildings the seven level structure is returning to its former glory. Working from the Architect's original plans, the Oamaru Sand Stone and Port Chalmers Blue Stone facade will shed layers of paint during the restoration.

The later addition of an intervening level above the ground floor is being removed to return the marble pillared main chamber to its full two storey height. It's understood that this impressive space will be occupied by the award winning Wagamama Japanese restaurant chain. A basement level café will incorporate the restored Safe Deposit Vaults.

See a satellite view of this building's location

Restored School Re-opened at Waimate

Douglas school was once a centre piece of the small community 17km South-west of Waimate. The school opened with a roll of 20 in 1912, closing in 1951. The old building was donated by Timothy Mehrtens, whose father Martin was a former pupil of the school.

Moved in 2005 by the Lions Group to the grounds of Waimate Museum, the Mayor addressed a crowd in a top hats and coat tails yesterday at the re-opening of the restored School.

The Timaru Herald, Monday, 18 February 2008

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