The disasters that reshaped Wellington

Saturday, 28 December 2024

Wellington is blessed with pretty harbour views, a walkable city and is considered a cool place to live. But a good part of the reason for how Wellington is formed and looks comes right out of disaster. Deborah Morris looks at the ones that changed us forever.

Earthquakes, shipwrecks and fires are directly responsible for how Wellington came to be curled around the waterfront and even the look of our buildings.

Initially called Port Nicholson - the not-yet capital city was a collection of buildings on the shorefront.

Today that old shorefront is depicted by a series of plaques on the ground showing where it was and just how much of the city is reclaimed land. A lot of the city’s look is because of the lessons learned during disasters.

The shipwreck that anchored Wellington’s harbour

John Plimmer - often called the Father of Wellington - had a vision. He knew an opportunity when he saw it and the wrecked ship Inconstant was it.

Inconstant was a fully rigged sailing ship and one of the biggest wooden ships of its time.

She was wrecked when she ran aground onto rocks at Pencarrow Head in 1849 while en route from Australia to Peru via Wellington.

The ship was refloated and towed to Wellington but found to be so badly damaged she was condemned.

What Plimmer saw was a huge amount of free wood and the possibility to put the hull to good use.

He had it towed to what is now called Lambton Quay - right where the Old Bank Arcade is now.

Plimmer bought the hull for £80 which he turned into a wharf which was linked to the shore by a bridge and served as one of the first piers with the interior serving as a warehouse and auction room. It became known as Plimmer’s Ark.

It also served as a bonded customs store, immigration pier and office for the first Wellington harbourmaster. A light mounted at the seaward side of the ship became the first harbour light in Wellington.

Gradually the hull became landlocked as buildings and land were built up around it.

It became the anchorpoint (pun intended) for the centre of what we now call the Golden Mile.

It was discovered again in 1990 and is visible now as an archeological dig beneath the Old Bank Arcade.

Earthquakes shook up how we thought about buildings

Wellington was full of brick buildings. Bricks were relatively cheap as a permanent building material.

In 1848, with about 3000 inhabitants, Wellington was a growing town that was taking on a fixed look with the type of buildings going up.

It literally came tumbling down in the 1848 earthquake of 7.5 centred in Marlborough.

It was the dead of night when the shaking, which was to last two minutes, began sending residents rushing outside. They were right to do so. Their brick and stone buildings were falling.

Barrack Sergeant James Harris Lovell was walking along Farish St with his daughter Amelia, 4 and son William, 6 when bricks fell and crushed them during an aftershock.

They were immediately dug out but Amelia had already died while William and his father died in hospital.

The ongoing earthquakes, which started on October 16, were preceded by a severe storm and continued for eight days.

Commercial buildings, barracks, the jail and the hospital were damaged and patients were taken to Government House for treatment.

The day after the largest of the shakes, the tide rose, overflowing what was then Lambton Quay. People panicked and tried to escape, some opting to try for Australia. Many boarded the barque Subraon to sail for Sydney but there was no escape. The barque ran ashore at the Wellington Heads where she was wrecked.

All the passengers were saved but found themselves back in the city they had tried to flee.

When it all died down, buildings lay in ruins.

It became clear that brick and stone were a problem. Those buildings still standing were wooden.

So rebuilding started, this time in wood.

But it wasn’t something one of the city’s most colourful characters wanted.

The grandly-named German-born Baron Charles Ernest von Alzdorf had come to New Zealand in 1840 and bought land in the Hutt Valley, but he preferred his brand new hotel on Wellington’s waterfront to being a farmer.

Close to where the Thistle Inn is now, it had been standing in the earthquake of 1848 and had some damage before being rebuilt to two storeys.

Von Alzdorf boasted about his hotel, called The Wellington Hotel being built of brick and plaster.

He was justly proud of it, complete with European facilities like a steam bathhouse, one room with a vapour bath.

It was flash and new and the Premier at the time Henry Sewell called it quite the most pretentious building New Zealand had yet seen.

The Baron had derided the other buildings in Wellington built of wood. He thought brick was the way to go.

It would be fatal.

He had not learned the lessons that Wellingtonians had learned only seven years before when a series of earthquakes all but destroyed 80 brick and stone buildings leaving the wood ones standing.

On January 23, 1855, a massive earthquake struck Wellington and the Wairarapa area about 9.17pm.

The Baron, who had had a stroke a couple of months earlier, had been sitting before a fire and a portion of the wall with the brick chimney on it fell in on him.

The earthquake set the standard for powerful shakes, registering as 8.2 and originated on the Wairarapa fault and generated a tsunami in Cook Strait.

About 250 aftershocks were felt in the following hours.

His name is the only one readily found. Several Māori died in Wellington and the Wairarapa, several when a building collapsed on them but reports from the time don’t name them.

The destruction of Government buildings and banks built with brick led to a revolution in building in Wellington.

The Old Government building - now the Victoria University Law School - began in the 1870’s. Now a heritage site, the lesson had been well and truly learned.

But it wasn’t just the buildings, the coastline around Porirua was raised and thousands of miles of land in East Wellington were raised by several metres.

The Basin Reserve, back then called the Basin Lake, a bit optimistically because it was really a swamp, had been earmarked for a dock, but after the earthquake it began to drain. A few years later prisoners were brought in to add fill and the ground we now know began to take shape. It was recognised as the city’s official cricket ground in 1866.

The remains of von Alzdorf’s brick-lined wine cellar have since been found in Bowen House. A display shows bricks from the cellar along with bottles recovered.

The fires that changed our look

A fire in 1901 in Mt Victoria razed the hillside and destroyed 22 homes, including many of the grand homes initially built in the city. Hampered by low water pressure and high winds, the Fire brigade struggled to put it out.

But it paled in comparison to the fire that raged through the city centre on 1906.

The fire was devastating - but for the warning of a little dog, it might have been much worse.

Two weeks after Robert Wilson took in a stray terrier from the streets of Wellington, he woke early one morning to the dog barking repeatedly.

It was about 3.30am and Wilson was the porter for the Commercial Hotel on Lambton Quay.

About 60 people were asleep at the hotel at the time.

Wilson rose to find out why his new dog was barking and discovered a fire - already beginning to burn the hotel.

The fire alarm was raised and people evacuated.

But it was already too late.

The fire had begun in a wooden room of a nearby auction house on October 22, 1906.

It surged along the street and tore through the buildings, getting perilously close to buildings on The Terrace and huge volumes of smoke billowed into the sky.

But the real threat was a gale force northerly wind, driving the fire further and further along Lambton Quay.

People also came to watch and had to be controlled by police.

Several buildings were destroyed already by the time the Fire Brigade managed to get in place but another problem was a lack of water to the site.

Not long before the fire started (and proving that there really are no new problems) the main water pipe had burst leaving virtually no water in the inner city.

Desperately , the fire brigade ran their hoses to the sea to begin pumping water on to the fire.

Hours later with the fire under control the list of buildings destroyed was the Wellington Auctioneering Mart, Trocadero, Dryer's Commercial Hotel, Job Corban's fancy goods, Shields tailor, Whitcombe and Tombs, Bank of New South Wales, the New Zealand Insurance buildings, with several offices upstairs, the Wellington Trust and Loan Office, A. T. Bate, commission agent, The Strand Cafe, and the Union Bank L. ,H. Wilson sharebroker, the Alliance Assurance and the Imperial Insurance Companies.

Even then sparks kept reigniting small fires for some time.

There were many questions about the lack of water problem and newly appointed city engineer William Hobbard Morton began improvements to the water supply, sewers, tramways and public reserves. It also led to electrical wiring being put underground since the fire had ran along the lines to new buildings.

Morton had been born in Melbourne in 1866 and educated there before going into the Public Works department coming to New Zealand in 1904.

Wellington was the first municipality to have a public water supply - since 1878 - but it wasn’t enough for a rapidly growing city.

Morton expanded the upper Karori Dam in 1908 and went on to design the dam in Wainuiomata which was named after him when it opened in 1911 and decommissioned in 1988 after concerns about its safety in an earthquake.

Only two months later another fire would change the end of Lambton Quay. The December 1906 fire at Parliament prompted the rebuild of government buildings.

Parliament’s watchman Amos Wilby had just done his rounds at 2am and was about to make himself a cup of cocoa.

Until then nothing had alarmed him. And as he reached his office he heard a noise that sounded a bit like rain. In fact, it was the sound of a huge fire breaking out.

He rushed to sound the alarm, threw open the gates for the fire trucks and tried to fight the fire himself with a hose.

With most of the building made of wood, the fire spread rapidly, through the lobby and Bellamy’s restaurant.

Bellamy’s was soon lost and the battle was on to save the library.

Chains of people began ferrying out the precious books to the lawn of Parliament, desperate to save irreplaceable books, paintings, documents and even furniture.

The library, however, stood up to the fire, behind iron fire proof walls and an iron fire proof door.

Attention then turned to the Government buildings which were next to be threatened but hosing down its walls saved it.

The fire was large enough that it lit up the night sky, bringing people from all over Wellington to watch.

Bellamy’s was largely destroyed and the cellar filled with wine and cigars was flooded.

It was believed an electric fault in the wiring that started the fire.

The current Edwardian neo-classical Parliament Buildings were then designed and built in later years.