Salisbury Garden Court was a speculative venture by local builder Herbert Pillar and his wife Kate. Consisting of 16 houses built above Cecil Road high on the western side of Tinakori Hill, the venture – based on examples in the United States – was completed in 1930, in the depths of the Depression.
Salisbury Garden Court was one of a number of schemes developed in the first half of the 20th century that drew on the principles of Garden City residential design. The provision of functional and economic floor plans within standardised houses arranged according to the topography of their site and sharing communal space, are the quintessential characteristics of Garden City suburbs.
Salisbury Garden Court can be compared with architect James Bennie's attempt to address the chronic post-WWI housing shortage in Wellington with his bungalow developments at Island Bay (c.1922) and Karori (1927). Bennie imported his precut houses from the Gordon-Van Tine Company of Davenport, Iowa in the U.S.A., while the Department of Railways established a precut housing factory at Frankton in Hamilton (1920-29) to facilitate its efforts to improve railway workers' accommodation along Garden City suburb lines. Samuel Hurst Seager's private ventures at Clifton Spur, Sumner in Christchurch and Durie Hill in Wanganui (1919) are high-style antecedents for the Pillars' project, and all of these schemes were to lay the foundation for the Garden City-influenced State Housing scheme of the 1930s.
This extract from an Australian article titled 'On Building the Home', which was reprinted in the April 1919 issue of New Zealand Building Progress, seems to sum up the ethos behind the development of Salisbury Garden Court.
Such a home is within the means of every man of decent salary, and why people live in the city in crowded boardinghouses when they can have charming little establishments of their own, with a scrap of garden, and save still further money by growing a few vegetables of their own, is beyond human comprehension. The only explanation is lack of enterprise.
Herbert and Kate Pillar conceived their communal housing development after visiting the United States in 1929. The concept involved the construction of 10-20 small houses around a central court of gardens and grounds. They formed a company, Salisbury Garden Court Ltd. with share capital of £1000, while other money was raised via a loan from the Government Life Insurance Office. In November 1929 the Pillars bought a large piece of land on the uphill side of Cecil Road.
The Pillars hired architect Fred Chinn (1885-1962) to design the houses and layout. His practice was based in the Odlins building on Cable Street and he did some designs for the housing development work of John Odlin and Co. He practised in Wellington from about 1904 to 1934 and in that time designed about 75 buildings and houses, along with his Odlins work. He moved to Heretaunga in 1934. Indeed there was also a connection between the Odlins and Pillar over Salisbury Garden Court – the name Odlin and Pillar is listed on the council's main file for the scheme and John Odlin and Co. provided a mortgage for the Pillars for the property.
In his application to the Wellington City Council, Chinn described the scheme as an 'experimental bungalow court' built to provide accommodation for 'professional and business men'. The latter, he said, struggled 'to rent a small modern home in a good district without occupying apartments, or so-called flats in old wooden houses sub-divided'.
While it was always intended to build the houses around a central tennis court and gardens, the Pillars also planned a proper road into the area, but it never materialised. Cone cites a comment by the Pillar's son suggesting that a road in was never seriously considered.The decision to provide only a path as access had a significant impact on the kind of people who moved there and the way they lived their lives. Perhaps, as Cone speculates, the onset of the Depression persuaded the Pillars to scale back their original concept.
Sixteen houses were constructed during 1930 by Pillar's firm. The land was steep, and platforms had to be excavated to build the houses on. The houses were arranged in pairs. Access for construction was difficult; a goat track up from Cecil Road past No.7 may have been used. A caretaker was appointed to maintain the area and he lived in the bottom of No.1, the only purpose-built lower ground flat.
Once completed, the houses were made available for rental. However, few professionals were attracted to live there and most of the early tenants were tradesmen and labourers and their families. While the difficulty over access may not have attracted many professionals, relatively few people had cars then anyway. Cecil Road was walking distance to the tram terminus at Wadestown, which would have been sufficient for some. An early occupant who stayed for over 40 years was Dan Weir, of No.5, who did a variety of mainly labouring jobs over his working life.
The pattern was set for the next 30 years. During that period, the place evolved slowly. In 1946, it is understood that the company was sold to a Mr Rosenburg, although there is no record of this on the relevant CT; Salisbury Garden Court Ltd. remained the name of the owner. Rents were paid to Rosenburg's agent, real estate agent Bernard Weyburne. Tenants had to pay a sum of £150 to secure a tenancy, which was a large sum then. Tenants complained that little or no maintenance was done and, in 1959, when the company tried to put up the rents, they took him to court. It ruled that rents could not go up till maintenance was attended to. It wasn't, and so rents stayed where they were.
After World War II many thousands of Polish refugees arrived in the country and a considerable number moved to Wellington. They started moving in to the Court in the late 1940s and by 1959, all but two of the houses were occupied by Poles. By the time the last one left in the late 1960s, 59 Poles had lived at the Court at one time or another.It became a kind of haven for the refugees and they stamped their own cultural identity on the place.
In 1968 Salisbury Garden Court was sold to the Loan Investment Co. who sold the property to Tinakori Heights Ltd. the following year. In 1970, the company had DP 32496 drawn up and the houses were placed on new titles, in pairs 'because a property division would have resulted in substandard lots.'The WCC was keen to avoid this outcome too. The formal changeover was on 5 May 1971 and the first of the properties were sold off after this. As they were sold in pairs, investors were attracted and about half the properties remained rented throughout the 1970s. To accommodate those who wished to sell or buy houses individually, cross leases were arranged to allow houses to share a title.
Despite the continued tenancies, first time homeowners moved in and the culture altered with the changing times. Some people were attracted by the concept of an urban commune and even tried to engineer such an outcome by getting friends to buy houses there. Although this never worked, the core householders developed a communal lifestyle that, in some senses, lingers on today.
Working bees were organised to clear the weeds and to plant trees, a vegetable co-operative was established, there were periodic tennis court auctions of unwanted household items, and childminding was shared. A group interested in mediation (sic) met regularly for lunch, baked their own bread and made their own tofu. Several households also kept bees until local children began being stung.
As a symbol of those co-operative times, when a piece of land to the rear of Salisbury Garden Court was put on the market in 1976, residents banded together to buy it and prevent its development. The land, known as Rangiohua Reserve, adjoins the Town Belt. As the tenants-in-common moved on, the land reverted to the remaining owners. Just four residents today own shares in the land. There was a lot of planting undertaken within the Reserve and the Court itself during the 1970s and today the area has evolved into a mature setting for the houses.
Since the houses moved to multiple ownership many have had alterations, mostly involving converting basements into living areas or internal alterations of one form or another. Two of the houses have had rooftop additions. The first recorded alteration was in 1981, when 14a had a double bedroom added. There were changes to six houses in the period 1990-91, and another flurry in the early 2000s.
By the 1990s the professional classes had arrived in earnest but the arrangement of the houses ensured that the community concept survived. Some owner / occupiers still remain from the 1970s, but in keeping with the traditions of the place, there has been a regular turnover of occupants. The access remains an issue, with a half-in-jest suggestion that families with young children often move on once the difficulties of negotiating the path become evident. A key component of the area change has been the retention of the community spirit exemplified by the households that jointly keep chickens, the many social events, and the general care and consideration that neighbours show each other.
