Could this be this country’s finest map?

Men need a store that has the right thing for their thing, like a Kenneth Cole suit made with Showflex fabric to keep them cool at their cousin-in-law's third wedding in the middle of July. Whatever the thing, Men's Warehouse has the clothes for it. Love the way you look? Men's Warehouse. Adams Terrace is a very steep street, as you've heard, in Wellington's Aro Valley, and it features on a map.

we're about to talk about. It's a map of Wellington City, first made in 1891, I believe, by surveyor Thomas Ward.

obsessive in its detail. It's thought to be unique as a record of a New Zealand city for its time. It's my favourite book of the year, I have to say, because it provides a visual structure, the map for a very handsome new book. It's called Mr Ward's Map. It's by Elizabeth Cox and it's been published by Massey University Press. It records a crowded, expanding capital city, over 88 sheets. Each of those sheets is about the size of an A1 poster.

And yet it's not just Mr Ward's map, it's Elizabeth Cox's history. She doesn't just decode the map for us, she brings the contents alive. There's photographs, there's drawings, there's writing by the likes of Catherine Mansfield and many others sort of making this a really exciting tale of our fledgling, diverse colonial culture.

Well, Elizabeth Cox specialises in architectural and women's history. She runs Bay Heritage Consultants and she's researched and written about hundreds of heritage buildings. She was a senior historian at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage and previously wrote Making...

Space, a history of New Zealand women in architecture, which was published in 2022. And she joins me here in the Wellington Pornakee studio for Culture 101. Kia ora, Elizabeth. Kia ora, Mark. And I was just saying to you before we went on air that I...

to live on Adams Terrace like half of the university students of Wellington. Isn't that incredible? And could you ski like it was the Winter Olympics? Yeah, just about. And, of course, Devon Street right next door was equally as impressive. Yeah, that's impressive.

Impressively steep, isn't it? It's quite amazing. Who then was, you must know, who was Adams? Yes, so Adams actually was William Adams and he and his wife Lavinia were living in this area of... Ara Valley and they actually developed Devon Street because he was from Devon and Adams Terrace and Land Cross Street up at the top of Devon Street and they were local property developers and they just built heaps of houses.

But Lavinia was also a property developer in her own right. And there was actually, she owned her own houses. And when she died, they had lots of children. I've forgotten quite how many. And when she died, her will.

actually distributed each of those houses to all of her different children. So she was equally as impressive as her husband. We could be here for hours, you realise. Yeah, I know. A lot of stories like that. And I know, of course, we're a national station. There's people listening from all over the country. and we're talking about Wellington. But it's an interesting period, isn't it? I was looking at the population size. It grew hugely, I think.

Almost 50,000 by the end of the century. It was growing hugely. It was far bigger than Auckland maybe at this stage. It was growing very fast. But the strange thing is that it was... For a capital city, it was actually really small, as you say, 50,000 people. So the area that the map covers was the capital city, and it was... Wellington at the time was prescribed by the boundaries of the town belt, and so all those people were living in there, but it was a very small community to be running.

the whole country. Plus Wellington was also the head, unlike now where Auckland has a much bigger role in finance and insurance and banking and all that, Wellington was also the head of New Zealand's bank. and insurance system. So all of that was happening here. So as you say, it's within the, I guess, the extent of the town belt. I think we didn't have, Kilburn really hadn't taken off as a suburb. So the sheets that... Thomas Ward did take us from Thorndon to...

Berenpola, I think. Yes, that's right, yeah. And he walked every single street? Yes, he must have. He must have taken a theodolite along with an assistant who would have been called a chain man. And with that, he measured every single street. and every single house and every single outbuilding, outdoor toilet. He even provides the levels above.

the high water mark, and all through the city. So it doesn't look like a contour map when you look at it, but if you look more closely, it effectively acts as a contour map because he's done these levels all over the place. some of those steep streets that you mentioned, of which we have lots in Wellington, you can track him stopping and taking the levels as he walks up some of those steep streets.

You can see that he must have gone on to people's back gardens because he's taken levels in people's back gardens. And possibly knocked on their doors because he actually records how many bedrooms there were in the houses. Yes, how many rooms. Ah, how many rooms. There wasn't a building permit system.

in Wellington when he started drawing the map so he couldn't possibly have just gone down to the local council and looked at all the architectural plans because they didn't exist so yes I don't know for sure how he knew how many rooms there were in their houses. I presume. He must have asked. It was knocked on the door. And was this something he was asked to do or was he a genuine kind of obsessive? So Wellington...

The government at the time were really concerned about these fast growing urban centres all over the country that were... growing too fast and the drains and the infrastructure couldn't keep up so they actually passed a piece of legislation that required all the councils the urban councils to create a map but

But all of the city councils ignored that set of instructions for quite some time, and they repeated it in updates of the legislation. And Ward actually approached Wellington City Council and said, how about I draw you a map? He was very dismissive of what maps the city already owned, the council already owned, because they weren't really worth the paper they were drawn on for a surveyor like him. And so he went to the council and offered to draw.

a map and when he started he was just going to draw the legal titles based on the legal title system that we had and then After he'd begun, he wrote to the council and said, I've had another idea. How about I draw all the buildings as well? And for the big commercial buildings, he didn't just draw a square. He drew the footprints so you can see the shapes. a commercial building has a fancy set of columns at the front. You can see the shape of the columns. Wow, yeah.

But yes, as I said, he also was drawing everybody's outdoor toilets. And he continued to amend it, didn't he, for 10 years or so? Yeah. So that made it...

makes the map infinitely more valuable to a historian like me because we're interested in change. That's what historians are all interested in. He handed in a final version of his map in the very end of 1891. But then for the next 10 years, he used to go into the council and every six months or so he would update the map.

So every time somebody pulled an old building down and replaced it with a new one he'd go along and stick a tiny, tiny piece of paper onto the map and then draw the new building over the top. And so in the version, when I originally started writing this book about two and a half years ago or so, we were planning on using the original nice clean copies of the maps, the original 1891.

But my publisher and I realised that actually the later version, the one that tracks the changes of the city over the next 10 years, actually added real value. Because... readers will be able to see how the city changed in that time. So he was drawing in because...

Because the city was developing and infrastructure was developing so fast in that 10 years, the 1890s, he was drawing whole new streets that had been built. He was showing where... slums were being pulled down and new areas were being built over the top of those slums right down to the detail of in the early colonial period in Wellington a lot of buildings had timber shingle roofs so which is very dangerous and fires obviously so in the 1890s huge numbers of people

took their timber shingles off and replaced them with corrugated iron. And so somebody came along and actually wrote corrugated iron over the top of all of these houses. It's a work of art. And I guess a map is one thing. And I've got...

The dust jacket of your book is actually one example. And if you're going to hear me rustling, it's the joy of unfolding a map, which now everyone's got to... got a map on their phone you might have forgotten this kind of joy right it's an a1 size sheet there's there's 88 of these you can probably hear me rustling um but what's wonderful about that is your book just brings it all so vividly

to life. You know, we're talking like things like oyster saloons. Yes, oyster saloons were very popular in Wellington at the time. It was a fad that had been brought in from Manhattan where that was the done thing. We actually had oyster beds growing at Belena Bay. Oh, yes. And so... Round from Oriental Bay. That's right, yeah. Slightly off the map. Yes, unfortunately, slightly not included in my map. But the oyster saloons were...

There were quite a few of them in Lampton Quay and Cuba Street. Some of them run by some of our very early Greek immigrants into Wellington.

It's such a beautifully designed book. Who did the design? So I was very lucky to work with Jo Bailey, who is a lecturer at Massey University in their creative... department there and so she fully embraced the sort of nerdiness of what I was trying to achieve so when you look at the book you'll see that I had a lot of fun matching the historic photos up with little clips out of the maps so um she has helped me by

highlighting the houses and showing how they link together. I spent thousands of hours staring at photographs of the 1890s. Because Ward was so precise about showing bay windows and verandas and footprints of buildings, you can actually exactly map historic photos onto his map. Gosh, yes. This idea of telling history through a map.

Was that your idea and had you seen this being done before? Oh, no, I'm sure lots of other people have done this sort of thing overseas before. Although I'm not sure, 570 pages about one city, I'm not sure that has been done before. The culture, Elizabeth, I want to talk about. It's not just about buildings. What really struck me... is that when we look at this time when you know

The colonial nature of people, immigrants coming from all sorts of different places, bringing their cultures together is so rich. The diversity that we see both in the retail sector from sort of a Lebanese fancy goods store to the Chinese. fruit and veg, you know, to the oyster saloons, to the friendly societies and clubs, like the watchers, you've got the pigeon and canaries.

Poultry, Pigeon and Canary Society. I mean, it's really diverse. Yes, absolutely. And that was, I'm glad you picked that up because that was one of the things I really wanted to get across was the cultural diversity in the city. The stats in the census might seem to show that everyone was British. But if you go down underneath that, there was a lot of diversity. There were a lot of really interesting communities in the city. Some were living together.

And some were sort of more dispersed across the city. But there were lots of different cultural groups. And the other thing I really wanted to achieve in the book was to look at the lives of women in the city. the hard work that they were doing. There were so many... business women women running clubs and charities and businesses it really was quite striking so this is kind of where working as a historian you get to kind of

well, set the record straight to a degree or at least kind of expose some of the prejudices that we might have around what our society looked like. Sure. So, you know, the... The subtitle of this book is Victorian Wellington Street by Street. And I think people might think of Victorian women as just floating about in fancy dresses. And there was quite a bit of... A lot of promenading, eh? There was a lot of promenading.

Walking was a big, showing off was a big thing in the culture. And there was a lot of women going off to balls at Government House and some of the other really big houses in Wellington, particularly in Thorndon on the terrace. But there were a lot of women working very hard to make money and also to service those women. You know, there were florists and dressmakers.

Something that really struck me, you know, sometimes you know something, but sometimes there are things that you just have never really thought about, was that almost all of the goods that we were using in Wellington, almost all of the...

Furniture we were sitting on in Wellington and almost all the clothes and so forth were actually made in Wellington by Wellingtonians. There was very few chain stores. There were very few... I mean, there were imports into a shop like Kirk's, but so much of it was being made here by hard-working Wellingtonians.

was really an interesting... Also that cheek by jail thing of industry and housing, an example that I... picked up was the detail of kids taking pillowcases and having them filled with broken biscuits from the sort of biscuit factory in what I think is now Victoria Street. Yes, down by sort of around near the Opera House now, yeah. So...

Pat Laylaw, who was a journalist in Wellington, he wrote some beautiful... diaries about his life as a child in Wellington and one of the stories was about him walking down Cuba Street and going to collect broken biscuits and watching all of the children. walking back up Cuba Street with the pillowcases over their shoulders, which was lovely. I really enjoyed discovering the stories of children. Children are often left out of histories.

Catherine Matsfield's obviously the ultimate Wellington child who grew up to write stories of her life. But Pate Laylaw and a bunch of others that I found were writing about their childhood later. Because it was the 1890s, and that's quite a long time ago now, it's quite hard to access oral history. Lots of historians like to use oral history in their work. But I did find a couple who were interviewed by National Radio.

in the Spectrum series back in the 70s, and they talked about their childhood in the 1890s. And you mentioned the Broken Biscuits. One of the... One of the people that was interviewed that I used in the book was a guy called George who, actually that's all he had for dinner, was broken biscuits. He was really very poverty stricken, his family, and he used to... go to a shop and ask for broken biscuits and the he wrote he talked about how the shopkeepers used to hassle him and say oh you're just

You're just lazy and greedy because you want these broken biscuits. And he said what they didn't realise is that's what his family was eating for dinner. The poverty was really very striking. Elizabeth Cox, it's been great to have you. I didn't get to talk to you about saltwater baths, for example. You think people had to go to the bath to get washed. So many wonderful stories in here. The tug-of-war competitions. Goodness, I think people really need to pick up this book.

It's MAP, Victorian Wellington Street by Street. It's quite the achievement, Elizabeth. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for joining us. Thanks.