Heritage et AL

I recently heard someone refer to St George’s Anglican Church in Auckland, as being the 'wedding' church. I'd been to a funeral once there, a few years back, and thought it was a pretty amazing historic building with all the wood and the stained glass windows and the old fashioned pews. But I'd never thought of it as a wedding church, and in fact had never realised there was such a thing. Granted, the person who told me this was of an age where she had seen her children married in the kind of weddings that require a PhD in Organisation along with a serious talk with someone at the bank. Barefoot on a beach with a single daisy was never going to cut it with those girls. But for there to be such a thing as a wedding church? My ignorance on such matrimonial matters is clearly appalling. Thus it was quite a coincidence when I was checking out the new books here at the Central Research Centre this week, that I saw a copy of  a book celebrating the centenary of St Geo...

Friends of mine moved in to their new house recently, one of those established Ponsonby villas which has been done up with a garage put in. It has the same bones of its early 1900s self but with far less land than it would have originally been on. It is in St Mary's Road and it was an interesting exercise to explore the Auckland Council's Archive to see if the property was on its City of Auckland's 1908 map. A simple Google search of Auckland Council Archives takes you straight to their home page and clicking on Search the Archives takes you to the link to the map . There are two different ways to search the City of Auckland's 1908 map. One is by browsing ; the other is by doing a keyword search . Using the keyword search we typed in St Mary's Road and up came the portion of the map with that particular street in it. Once you have enlarged the map you will notice the blue pins. My friend's house on St Mary's Road has a blue pin, which we cl...

Dotted around Auckland are a number of residential and commercial buildings designed by Canadian architect Sholto Smith (1881-1936) which are now part of Auckland’s architectural heritage.  While researching Auckland’s War Memorial libraries for the Our Boys  website, I discovered Smith was noted as the designer of the gorgeous, little Albany War Memorial Library - although there is some controversy over whether it was Smith or his business partner, Thomas Mullions who played the bigger part in the design. Ref: Jock Phillips and Chris Maclean, Albany War Memorial Library, about 1986, from nzhistory.net.nz Smith arrived in New Zealand in 1920, when he was 39 years old, and joined the architectural practice of TC Mullions and C. Fleming McDonald.  He became partner after McDonald’s death and together with Mullions went on to design both residential and commercial properties. Among them the Shortland Flats in downtown Auckland which the pair owned as a venture to...