Shelter. It’s one of the most basic of human needs, but there wasn’t a lot of it around for those colonial settlers arriving in Whakaraupō/Lyttelton Harbour in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In fact, when organised settlement commenced in December 1850, there was largely nothing: you couldn’t rent or buy a house and, quite frankly, you’d struggle to find someone to build you one. But it didn’t take long for this situation to change: there were houses for sale or rent by late January 1851 (Lyttelton Times 25/1/1851: 1), which is pretty impressive. While this early development of the housing market is pretty interesting and is an idea worth examining, today I’m going to explore what these 1850s houses looked like.
The first advertisement found for a house for sale or rent in Christchurch or Lyttelton, which dates from January 1851. Bear in mind that the first Canterbury Association colonial settlers arrived in December 1850. Image: Lyttelton Times, 25 January 1851: 1.
For those who arrived in this very earliest wave of colonial settlement, the first housing options were fairly basic. For two weeks, you could stay in the immigration barracks, which had been built by the Canterbury Association in anticipation of the housing shortage (Innes 1879: 11). After that, you were on your own. Some settlers lived in tents made from blankets, others in iron stores and some in turf cabins (Lyttelton Times 11/1/1851: 4). Dr Barker, of course, had his famous studding-sail tent. And then there was what seems to have been a particularly Canterbury ‘thing’: the V-hut. Which was basically a house with a roof but no walls. Or you could think of it as an antecedent of the A-frame house. Some settlers enlisted the labour of Māori, and had raupō whare built for them (and they were described as whare by the settlers of the day; Innes 1879: 22). And some had ‘portable houses’ – that is, prefabricated dwellings, although these do not seem to have been common (Hancock 1996).
V-huts in Christchurch. Image: Dr Alfred Charles Barker, Canterbury Museum, Accession no. 1958.81.372.
But soon more substantial dwellings were being built, with the first reference to a weatherboard house dating to February 1851 (Lyttelton Times 15/2/1851: 1). Only a handful of houses – or even buildings – from this era survive in and around Ōtautahi Christchurch, including the Deans cottage, Englefield Lodge, the former Middleton homestead, Chokebore Lodge, Tiptree cottage, and Stoddart cottage. Englefield, Middleton, Chokebore and Tiptree were cob buildings, while the Deans and Stoddart cottages were clad in weatherboards. The latter is likely to have been the more common building material, given that it was quicker to build in and more readily available. It is certainly what is most visible in photographs of the day, such as Dr A. C. Barker’s photographs of Christchurch from the early 1860s (see below).
Looking west down Armagh Street, c.1859-60, with Riccarton Bush in the distance, showing the predominant type of house at the time. Image: Dr Alfred Charles Barker, Canterbury Museum, Accession no. 1944.78.122.
The houses in Barker’s photographs were small cottages, sometimes one storey, sometimes two, clad in weatherboard, with a shingled gable roof and at least one fireplace (with an external chimney). And when I say small, I mean small. Helpfully, in 1851, house size (in feet) was a key metric in real estate advertisements, and so I can tell you that the largest advertised for sale or rent was 66 m2 (Lyttelton Times 5/4/1851: 4). Most were in the 20-30 m2 range, but one was just 11.1 m2 (Lyttelton Times 17/5/1851: 8). These houses typically had between one and four rooms, although one was advertised as having nine, and, if Charlotte Godley’s reminiscences are anything to go by, would not have offered full protection from the elements (Godley 1951: 170, 191; Lyttelton Times 13/9/1851: 1). By the end of the decade, real estate advertisements only used the number of rooms to quantify the size of houses, making it difficult to analyse how this changed over the period. But it’s clear that these later houses had more rooms, with most of those advertised having between four and nine rooms. Most would have looked like those in Barker’s photographs, but some were able to add a bay and street-facing gable to their house (creating the bay cottage form), or dormer windows (Watson 2022: 47).
Māori who were living or staying in or around Christchurch in the 1850s are recorded as having whare, but there is no written description of what these looked like (Taylor 1952: 48, 58). It’s possible that these were akin to wharepuni, a house or sleeping house, built of raupō, ponga (although possibly not here in Canterbury) and kiri (bark), with a thatched gable roof. Wharepuni typically had a low door and may or may not have had a porch or window. Prior to European arrival, wharepuni often had earthed-up walls, but this became less common in the 19th century (Schrader 2013). The raupō whare Europeans employed Māori to build may have been quite similar in appearance to this.
But here’s the thing. Most people might have been building houses like those shown in the picture above, but the elite were not. It’s perhaps naïve of me, but I remain surprised at how quickly the wealthy sought to distinguish themselves from everyone else through their housing. So, by 1857, Joseph and Sophia Brittan had built a brick Regency ‘pile’ (see below). To be fair, it wasn’t their first house in Christchurch, but still (Watson 2022: 118-119). The use of brick would have been enough to distinguish the house from others of the period, but it was also large, visually impressive and built in a recognisable architectural style. It was a very long way removed from the wooden cottages in which most of the colonial settlers were living, and was very much an expression of status, wealth and power – or the aspiration to these things (Watson 2022: 127-128). And then there were the Wilsons, who I’ve talked about previously over here. Actually, I only talked about John Cracroft Wilson, which was entirely remiss of me.* The point about the Wilsons is not so much that their house looked impressive, it was the size of it. (see also below) Built in c.1855, it had at least 10 rooms (Watson 2022: 103, 108). I don’t have a square metreage for it, but it was a long way from 11 or even 66 m2. These houses both survived until the Ōtautahi Christchurch earthquakes and, like most of the other houses of this period that remain standing, were atypical of 1850s dwellings.
Linwood House, 2003. Built c.1857 by Joseph and Sophia Brittan. Image: Jackie Snowdon - given to me by the photographer, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16775188
Jane and John Cracroft Wilson’s 13 room house, built in c.1853-54. Image: supplied.
There are two things that stand out for me in this very brief survey of Christchurch’s domestic architecture in the 1850s. The first is how quickly the real estate market in the city developed and the second is the aforementioned speed with which – and extent to which – the wealthy were able to distinguish themselves. These observations are both indicative of the fact that while, on the one hand, houses are very much about shelter from the elements, they are also about far more than that. To state the obvious, they are an object that can be bought, sold or rented for profit and personal gain. But they can also be used for personal advancement in another way, as a means of achieving a certain status in society or a way of displaying the status you either have or aspire to. All of this is, of course, much easier if you are wealthy.
Katharine Watson
*Fortunately I have a chance to redress that balance and you can all join in. On 26 July, I am giving an online seminar about women and houses in Victorian Christchurch, and Jane Cracroft Wilson is one of those who I will talking about. Come along, it’ll be fun! Details here: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/asha-seminar-series-women-and-their-houses-in-victorian-new-zealand-tickets-671344237687
References
Godley, Charlotte, 1951. Letters from Early New Zealand. Whitcombe & Tombs Ltd, Christchurch.
Hancock, Lynne, 1996. Settler housing in New Zealand. Journal of Architecture 1(4): 313-334.
Innes, C. L., 1879. Canterbury Sketches; or, Life from the Early Days. Lyttelton Times, Christchurch.
Lyttelton Times. Available at: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers
Schrader, Ben, 2013. “Māori housing – te noho whare - Wharepuni to European house.” Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand [online]. Available at: http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/maori-housing-te-noho-whare/page-1 [accessed 13 July 2023].
Taylor, W. A., 1952. Lore and History of the South Island Maori. Bascands, Christchurch.
Watson, Katharine, 2022. 101 Demolitions: how a disaster shed light on life in nineteenth century Christchurch. PhD thesis, University of Canterbury.