The Railways Department had a surprisingly long history of building houses for its workers. It built its first houses in the 1880s, albeit then to designs prepared by the Public Works Department. These buildings had a defined hierarchy of importance, established according to the seniority of employees, and there were a range of ‘classes’ of houses. Houses of relative distinction were built for stationmasters and traffic controllers, but houses for less important staff were often very basic. This established a pattern that the Department clung to for decades.
The Class A houses were generally elegant, reasonably well-appointed and distinguished houses but some Class B houses were very rudimentary. A drawing survives of the Railway House No.5 Class B, and it is no more than a symmetrical gabled cottage with a front door, a bedroom and a kitchen, with the ‘earth closet’ a considerable distance away.The Railway House No. 3, Class B was an early forerunners of the later examples used for mass production. It was a formal, symmetrical Georgian-style cottage with a lean-to for services to the rear or even separated from the main house.Despite their widespread use, these early houses were not put into mass production, and instead were made using local materials and labour and following an engineer’s pattern book to ensure maximum consistency in construction and appearance.
A mass housing scheme
The first examples of the provision of mass workers’ housing in New Zealand to draw on were the state housing settlements built under the Liberal Government’s Worker’s Dwelling Act 1905, the first of which had been begun in Petone in 1906. The exercise was largely unsuccessful in that it met few of its targets, in particular, although the houses were of a high standard, the area was remote from Wellington and the rents, coupled with travelling expenses, ended up unaffordably high for the intended occupants. There is no doubt though that this experience offered much for the Railways to learn from.
The first proposal within Railways for a systematic programme of house construction came in 1912 when the Department realised it faced an acute housing shortage for its workers near the country’s bigger cities. The itinerant nature of the railway business, brought about by the process of developing the infrastructure, required the regular relocation of employees and their families; this was often to areas where there was little or no housing available. It placed an imperative on the Department to provide accommodation for its employees quickly and efficiently in many parts of the country. As it had the means to get the houses to where they were needed (via the railway) the Department chose to use its own designed and mass-produced houses to achieve its aims. At this time the Department identified a need for 1,200 new homes around the country.
The Railways Department, although it had made the decision to provide mass housing, continued to use its 1880s-era designs until 1920. Over time complaints grew about the old-fashioned and dowdy appearance of these houses. By 1920 the Department had largely completed planning the design, manufacture and construction of its new houses. They were to be arranged in large settlements, laid out in the manner of the ‘garden suburb’, a then vogue overseas town planning concept. The project was put under the leadership of the department’s chief draughtsman, architect George (later Sir George) Troup, who was also responsible for many of the department’s standard and special station designs, as well as a plethora of other railway structures.
Troup travelled overseas to research house design and prefabrication factories. On his return, the new house designs were drawn up; contracts then given to private contractors to build the houses, as they had previously been. However, it was soon realised that the Department could build the houses significantly cheaper itself if it took advantage of prefabrication and mass production and realised the potential economies of scale. It was decided to search for a place to construct a sawmill and factory. Frankton Junction, just south of Hamilton, was chosen and it also became the site of the largest of the railway settlements. Pre-cut houses for staff, manufactured off-site, were built first and then the sawmill and factory followed.
The sawmill began cutting timber in January 1923 and by mid-1923 Frankton Junction’s factory was up and running. By March 1924, 255 houses had been cut and 61 were completed and occupied. The cost of a typical five-bedroom house dropped dramatically – from £831 in 1923, to £635 by 1926. At its peak the mill produced some 10,000m of timber and cut 400 houses a year. They were only erected in the North Island as it was still too expensive to ship the factory built houses to the South Island, and demand for housing in the south was judged insufficient to warrant establishing another factory. Over a period of six years the department built 1,591 houses, of which 314 were non-railway clients. The latter were built principally in Moera, Hutt Valley, where 306 houses alone were constructed under the auspices of the Hutt Valley Honorary Housing Committee. Backed by the Railways Department it was the only substantial response to attempts to interest local authorities in the cheap house-building venture.
The prefabrication system was carefully designed and extremely detailed. There was a 30-page instruction book for the system, and each piece of wood in each house was individually numbered. After the timber was railed to a building site a house could be constructed in very short order. Such was the speed and efficiency of the operation, it took significant pressure from private enterprise to have the factory closed down in 1929.
The new house designs were not a major advance on the previous railway houses, although they were better serviced. Externally they largely retained the formality of their predecessors – although in a forthright Edwardian style – and the internal arrangement was equally conservative, with a central front door letting on to a corridor, with rooms extending off this, and with services contained in a rear lean-to, all very much as the traditional bay villas of the later Victorian era. Their working-class occupants were given a front parlour, not usually a high priority for people in their social situation, who could make better use of the room as a bedroom. Hot and cold water services and baths were installed in every house and many had electric light and off-site sewerage. The Department aimed to install electric lighting in every house.
By 1925, there was pressure from the New Zealand Locomotive Engineers, Firemen and Cleaners Association on the Railways Department to provide houses for its members in Wellington.Suitable land had to be found. South Karori was investigated but was considered to be too far from a railway station. The rapidly expanding settlements of Ngaio and Khandallah were quickly turning from farms to suburbs and substantial land was available for subdivision. The Aplins, a long standing Ngaio family and the owners of Colway Farm, offered land for sale but the first time its purchase was considered by the Railways Board they rejected the proposal as unsuitable.
Eventually the Railways Department decided to buy part of the land. Seven hectares was purchased in February 1927 for £10,000, a considerable sum at the time. The site was just a seven-eight minute walk to and from the Ngaio railway station, which was then still on the main trunk line, ideally situated for moving workers both south and north. It was not until 1936 that the Tawa Flat Deviation was completed, relegating the Johnsonville line to commuter duties.
The contract for the road construction was let in July 1927. The streets were laid out on the sloping land in an orderly fashion, with a principal street (Tarikaka) running nearly the length of the roughly rectangular site, on a north-west to south-west orientation, with other streets extending off it. Despite the Garden City influences, there was no centrally located park, although one was provided by the WCC some 60 years later. The Director of Town Planning, Ministry of Works, insisted that the houses had to be built 15 feet (4.57 metres) from the road boundary.
The Wellington City Council’s Engineer’s Department submitted the proposed names of streets –Ngata, Turupa, Pomare and Timi Kare – to the Geographic Board of Lands and Survey.Ngata and Turupa were named for Sir Apirana Turupa Ngata, the famous Maori parliamentarian. Pomare and Timi Kare (James Carroll) also celebrated important Maori politicians. The Surveyor-General agreed with the proposal but suggested the exclusion of Turupa, replacing Timi Kara with Carroll and the inclusion of Tarikaka – literally ‘snare of the kaka’ – an earlier name for Mt Kau Kau, which overlooks Ngaio and Khandallah. It was also decided to extend Bombay Street – named, like many Khandallah Streets, after an Indian locality – to encompass the eastern tip of the settlement. The extension to Bombay Street required a considerable cutting to link up with Swansea Street.
The Railways Department was told by the council that it would have to take responsibility for the roads but that a cost sharing arrangement would be worked out.
The houses were essentially four variations on the same design but with different porches and rooflines to offer variation and visual interest in the streetscape. The overall site planning, following the standard practice of the day, had each house facing the street, which meant that most houses did not extract much benefit from the sun, particularly as the living rooms were, in the majority of the house plans, more or less in the middle of the building. With the setback mandated by the Director of Town Planning, the result was a very evenly spaced array of houses following the alignments of the roads over the shape of the land, a characteristic that was also carried through to later state house developments.
Within one year most of the houses in the area had been built. Each house came, complete in its parts, from the factory on the train and it took on average one week for a gang to erect them, illustrating the considerable on-site advantages of such comprehensive prefabrication.
As the houses became available Departmental employees moved in. The occupiers were exactly the kind of railway workers for whom the settlement was envisaged. The 1931 Wises Post Office Directory lists the professions of the male occupants of Tarikaka Street houses as, among others, locomotive driver, guard, porter, fireman, plumber, shunter and car cleaner. They paid one day’s wages per week in rent, or a total on average of £30.6.6 per annum. Unsurprisingly those occupations had changed little by 1957 and even in 1974, not long before Wises stopped recording the occupations of residents, most of the same professions were listed in its streets directories. Some jobs had passed on, such as porter, and new ones appeared, such as examiner.
Life was not necessarily easy for the house occupants. The houses were little better than basic. They were not insulated – often unbearably hot in summer (exacerbated by hot water, heating and cooking being provided by a coal range), cold in winter, and despite being elevated above the ground and well-provided with windows, somewhat prone to damp. The toilet was separately located and remained that way for decades. Tarikaka Street was a resolutely working class area and many of the early occupants were Maori. Maori still remain an important presence in the area, even after the sale of the houses, and 58 Tarikaka Street is today in use as a kohanga reo.
Not all the land was used in the first wave of housing. In 1938 work began on building houses on the remaining land. The provision of some of the housing has been linked to the gradual introduction, from 1936 onwards, of the 40-hour week, which steadily led to the need for more workers.Many of the new houses fronted Khandallah Road but in order to provide direct access to the properties Raihania Lane was built at the rear. These houses were distinguished by their tiled roofs, apparently a response to the lack of corrugated steel roofing during World War II.
Throughout the long period of its ownership New Zealand Railways was responsible for the maintenance of the houses and the upkeep of the area, including the streets and verges. The Wellington City Council assisted in the maintenance, although ultimate responsibility remained with Railways. In the case of the houses, the Department initially maintained them itself, sending travelling painters and paperhangers around the various settlements. Houses were painted and decorated on a roughly five to seven year rotation. Later this work was subcontracted out of the Department.
The area was, from the first – and by design, regarded as working class but over time the appearance of the area slowly declined. In 1966 the WCC and Railways Department renewed discussions that the former take over the settlement’s streets, but the council insisted that they first be brought up to general standards in terms of formation, water services and stormwater drainage. The terms were agreed to but never formalised.
The deterioration in the general appearance of the area became more pronounced during the 1970s as New Zealand Railways took increasingly less interest in its housing settlements. The costs of maintaining the now older houses had gone up and, in an inevitable downward spiral mirrored throughout all settlements, both manager and tenant took less interest in the appearance of the area. By 1980 a council memo made some uncomplimentary observations.
The area as a whole is very untidy and in need of an uplift and comprehensive clean up. Street litter includes such things as beer bottles, clothing, shoes, paper and other such articles and, on the whole, does not reflect very well on the Railways Department. Fences are in need of repair and the grass verges need mowing. Many of the sections are untidy and unmown. Garages, which have been built by residents, are situated at the western end of the Tarikaka Street. These are unsightly in appearance…
New Zealand Railways’ long standing policy of painting the houses every five years and redecorating interiors on a similar time span was not borne out by the experience of tenants. However, by 1980 it had managed to incorporate all but five of the detached toilets inside the houses.The age of the houses was also an issue. In 1980, a number of houses were repiled and their internal linings replaced.
By the early 1980s changing work-force requirements meant that New Zealand Railways came to regard its stock of railway houses as surplus to requirements, but it took a long time for it to dispose of the properties. In 1983 it was ready to start the process and again asked the Council to take over the streets. For its part the Council again identified the upgrading required before it would agree.
By 1985 New Zealand Railways had hired Truebridge Callender Beach to prepare a scheme for the subdivision of the land, including the required reserves contribution. The land was subdivided along the informal divisions established in 1928 but dispensations were sought because the lot widths did not meet council requirements. Dispensation was also sought for off street parking requirements, with particular reference to the houses in Tarikaka Street that were a considerable distance above the road. The town planning approval was granted and over the next two years roads, water services and drainage were fixed, individual title obtained for each section, and a reserve created by the removal of five houses on the corner of Ngata and Tarikaka Streets (rather altering the appearance of the area). Garages at the end of Tarikaka Street were also removed.
It was intended that the houses would first be offered to existing tenants, then to Railway staff, and only later be put on the open market. In March 1988, with sale of the houses imminent, the tenants formed the Ngaio Residents’ Housing Committee to deal with the Railways Department. Sale of the houses began late in 1988 and many were bought by existing tenants.
As the sales proceeded concern was expressed about the need to retain the settlement’s character and heritage value. It was recommended that design controls be instituted to ensure that future redevelopment would be sympathetic with the scale and design of existing buildings. This was never done. What did happen was that in March 1989 Council designated the area as a Community Improvement Area. Homeowners were encouraged to maintain and renovate their homes through the provision of a subsidised renovation advice service and general guidance for improving the general appearance of the area and the resolution of specific neighbourhood problems. The Community Improvement Area status was not in place for long and since then the only recognition the area has been given is its inclusion as an Historic Area in Wellington City District Plan, 2000.
