K Road Heritage

31/08/2026

31/08/2026

Auckland's Chinatown in Grey's Avenue - this area had been the location of a small number of Chinese businesses from the 1880s onwards. Chinese merchants imported items to sell to the general public but they played an important role providing traditional food, medicine and services to the mostly male Chinese population of agricultural workers (in particular acting as Banking Agents to send funds back to family in China).
From the 1870s to the 1920s the area now occupied by Aotea Square was the location of the Public Market. The various Chinese Market Gardeners worked and lived in the periphery of town (Western Springs for example) but needed to come into town to sell their produce. They would be joined by a few other Chinese men, most of whom were employed as private cooks or gardeners to wealthy households.
They then repaired to one of the local Chinese merchant establishments to socialise - enjoy proper Chinese food, music, alcohol and card games (along with illicit gambling and possibly O***m - which was legal until 1901).
The size of Auckland's Chinatown was not very big (possibly under a dozen businesses) but its notoriety grew quite large. Due to the wording of the 1901 O***m Prohibition Act the Police did not require a Search Warrant to search the premises of any Chinese person - this meant that the newspapers were full of reports of 'raids' on yet another Chinese Business.
Even though evidence of actual Gambling or O***m use might not be found, or the case would be thrown out of court this legal situation allowed the Police to bolster their statistics. The result was that in the minds of the general public it was taken as read that every Chinese Store was an O***m Den.
The notorious reputation that Greys Avenue had in the mid 20th century resulted in the decision to eliminate it in its entirety - beginning with clearances for new blocks of State Housing in the 1940s and the creation of the Civic Centre from the 1960s onwards there are now no old buildings in Greys Avenue at all - and this is in no small part due to the stigma that was attached, really rather unfairly, to the Chinese living there.

29/08/2026

Pinnacle, 18 St Martin's Lane, just off Symonds Street, adjacent to the Symonds Street Cemetery. This is an office block converted into apartments in 2016.

28/08/2026

The 1924 scheme for an Underground Rail Link for Auckland.

This would have bored a tunnel beneath Albert Park to link with Morningside - there was to be a station opposite the town hall in Queen Street (at that time a structure just over a decade old).

As having a station at the Town Hall and then another close by at Karangahape Road would not have been optimal it is unsurprising that the Queen Street station figures in this initial scheme. However, subsequent proposals in the 1920s proposed that the central city station would be better placed under Karangahape Road.
All through the 1920s the hesitancy of Wellington's Bureaucracy to commit to this project meant little progress was made - the New Zealand economy suffered an economic crisis in 1927 and just when things were getting better the 1929 Stock Market Crash and subsequent Great Depression meant this idea was more or less abandoned.
At this time there was already a proposal to relocate the main Railway Station from its original location near the Ferry Building to Beach Road (which is what happened at the end of the 1920s).
In hindsight this was a very bad idea but at the time it was thought likely that the burgeoning City Centre would expand to the east - transforming Beach Road into something like Thorton Quay in Wellington. The splendid Railway Hotel on Beach Road can be taken as an example of what was expected to follow