Appendix 4: Heritage Area Reports
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Appendix 4: Heritage area reports 1. Armour Avenue 2. Doctors Common 3. Elizabeth Street 4. Ellice Street 5. Lower Hawker Street 6. Moir Street 7. Porritt Avenue 30 Armour Avenue Heritage Area Mt Victoria, Wellington June 2017 Contents 1 Executive summary (or brief statement of significance) 1 2 Description of area 2 2.1 Area – contents and boundaries 2 2.2 Other features 2 2.3 Archaeology 2 2.4 Setting 2 2.5 Area plan 3 3 Historic context 4 3.1 History of area 4 3.2 History and description of key structures 5 4 Assessment of heritage significance 14 5 Sources 18 1 Executive summary (or brief statement of significance) The area consists of a continuous group of eight houses on the northern side of Armour Avenue in Mt Victoria. The street was formed following the 1894 subdivision of a Brougham Street property owned by local resident Catherine Gray. The area’s close proximity to town meant the sections were snapped up by those wanting to build their own homes as well as speculative builders. All the houses were built between 1897 and 1903, highlighting how colonial suburbs grew streets at a time. This was at the tail of the suburb’s original development; subsequent growth was mainly through land-use intensification. In common with most housing in Mt Victoria, the Armour Avenue group comprise a mix of one and two-storey timber structures, of varying sizes and sited on rectangular sections with narrow street frontages. A few of the houses were architecturally-designed, but most came from pattern books. What marks this group out from those in other streets is their architectural integrity. All are designed in the late-Victorian villa style and, as was common in this period, some feature elaborate architectural treatments. Subsequent renovations to their external fabric have been largely sympathetic to the villa idiom. This is rare in the Mt Victoria context and significantly increases the group’s architectural importance. The group highlights the 20th century history of Mt Victoria. In 1900 it was a socially-diverse community and most houses were single-unit dwellings occupied by homeowners and renters. This changed from the 1920s as many middle class residents left the area for more fashionable peri-urban suburbs. Many houses were converted into flats or boarding houses and the area became more working class and transient in nature. From the late 1970s, middle class house buyers returned to Mt Victoria, attracted by its heritage values and central location. By 2000 the suburb’s gentrification was largely complete. Armour Avenue illustrates this process at a street or micro-level. Some dwellings housed their owners, others were rented; some remained single dwellings, others became flats; a few residents had long occupation periods, many others were short. Common to all the houses has been their gentrification. In 2017 owner-occupiers outnumbered renters. The Armour Avenue houses stand out for not only their architectural integrity but for the way they embody or represent urban history. In the course a few metres they tell a story that not only reveals much about Mt Victoria’s past but that of New Zealand’s other inner city suburbs as well. 1 2 Description of area 2.1 Area – contents and boundaries This area incorporates a set of eight residential buildings on the northern side of Armour Avenue. This set is bookended by Brougham Street and Porritt Avenue and interrupted on the northern side by Albany Avenue. List of buildings 1 Armour Avenue 7 Armour Avenue 9 Armour Avenue 11 Armour Avenue 13 Armour Avenue 15 Armour Avenue 17 Armour Avenue 19 Armour Avenue 2.2 Other features Not applicable. 2.3 Archaeology Subdivision of this area was relatively late in the suburban development of Mt Victoria so it is likely that the area is not of potentially high archaeological value. 2.4 Setting Armour Avenue is located in the suburb of Mount Victoria in Wellington. It runs west-east, connecting Brougham Street with Porritt Avenue. The street sits in a dip between ridges on the western side of Mt Victoria. The eight houses identified for inclusion in this area are on the northern side of the street, interrupted, about halfway along by Albany Avenue, a short dead-end street perpendicular to Armour Avenue. The area has an established feel with some mature trees and established gardens adding to the general ambience, although no.s 1, 7, 9 and 11 are close to the street. 2.5 Structures and features There are eight houses in this area, all on one side of the street. They were all built within a short period around the turn of the 19th century. They do comprise something of a mixture of housing; there are two single-storey villas and six two- storey houses, with three being somewhat grander dwellings. By the standards of the time, none can be considered truly working class but Armour Avenue did have a range of occupants from different socio-economic groups. Most of the houses retain 2 notable levels of integrity, as well as original or appropriately designed boundary fences and the like. 2.6 Area plan 3 3 Historic context 3.1 History of area In December 1893 a major subdivision, including a private right of way, originally called Brougham Avenue, was prepared for Catherine Gray and son David Gray by surveyor Thomas Ward. The land was bought by William Gray in 1870. He and his wife Catherine arrived from Aberdeen on the Simlah in 1852 and initially settled in New Plymouth where William Gray was appointed Postmaster. After stints in Nelson, Dunedin and Auckland he was appointed Secretary of the General Post Office and Inspector of Post Offices, based in Wellington. He died in 1873 and Catherine Gray inherited his holdings. She later (1905) built a large house on the corner of Brougham Street and Brougham Avenue that still stands. Another of her sons, Alex Gray, built a house next door on Brougham Street and this also still stands. The Armour Avenue subdivision was part of a larger subdivision affecting Town Acres 318 to 329, land bounded on three sides by Brougham Street, Ellice Street and Austin Street. It came at a time when Mt Victoria was rapidly filling with houses and pressure was increasing to open up vacant land close to town. The Gray’s subdivision was approved on 27 February 1894. Roads were formed and parcels of land sold. Construction of the houses contained in this area began in 1897 and all eight had been built by 1903. In 1905, Armour (Brougham) Avenue became a public road. Houses on the other side of the street came later, after the sale of the land at the rear of Catherine Gray’s house in 1919, the year that she died.1 This was one of the last substantial subdivisions in Mt Victoria. In 1911, in an unexplained arrangement, the Wellington City Council’s Finance Committee determined that ‘application be made to the Government for the variation of the exemption of Brougham Avenue, so as to provide that no new building shall be erected within 10 feet [3.048 metres] of its southern boundary, between certain points.’2 So, with the exception of 34 Porritt Avenue (and 6 Armour Avenue, built in 1956), none of the houses on the southern side of the street were built within three metres of the street, or close to it, a considerable contrast with the north side. In 1969, the name of the street was changed from Brougham Avenue to Armour Avenue, after WA Armour, who was made the fifth principal of Wellington College in 1928. The purpose of this change was to remove the duplication of names, which caused problems for emergency services. 1 New Zealand Times, 4 October 1919, p.12 2 Dominion, 22 September 1911, p.7 4 The owner and occupants have been a mixture of middle and working class families, individuals and widows. In more recent decades the street has become somewhat gentrified, along with the usual changes to house interiors and alterations to rear elevations. However, this has had no dramatic effect on most of the street elevations of the houses. 3.2 History and description of key structures 1 Armour Avenue This two-storey villa was built for HC Petersen by Mr Dixon (possibly Robert Dixon, also the builder of 7 and 9) in 1899. The house has had a number of largely working class occupants, notably, from 1903, Linnaeus Partridge. Partridge was a jeweller who arrived in Wellington in 1898 and, despite the early setback of a fire at his workshop in Willis Street, went on to establish a well-known Wellington partnership with jeweller George Jenness. They soon gained a reputation for quality workmanship and undertook a number of important commissions which included medals and Prime Ministerial gifts. Street directories show that subsequent occupants included an assortment of working class men and several married (possibly widowed) women. Annie Bird was an early occupant; her son died in the wreck of the SS Penguin in 1909.3 Other occupants included, in 1913, Francis Beamish, a clerk, in 1921, William Perry, solicitor, in 1929, John William Knight, builder, and then in 1955, Joyce Seddon. By 1961/62 Stan Horsfield, an assistant manager shared the house with John Gowans, a stereotyper. To date, there has been a wide assortment of occupants. The building has undergone several important alterations. The upstairs extension and glazing of the verandah was most likely added in the 1920s. In 1944 the owner, builder JW Knight, undertook the work to convert the house into two separate flats.