The Anglican worshipping community in Ngaio has a comparatively recent history. A house on the corner of Abbot Street and Imlay Crescent was rented by the parish in 1906. Interior partitions were removed and a small mission church was established.
The mission was part of the Diocese of Wellington that was constituted in 1858 and included all the settlements from Wellington to the Hutt Valley, and further north along the west coast to Whanganui. The township of Ngaio was originally named “Crofton” (1860) after William Fox built a house of the same name at what is now 21 Kenya Street, but the town was renamed Ngaio in 1908.
Crofton/Ngaio was a small farming settlement that experienced ongoing urban expansion in the years after the Wellington to Manawatu railway opened in 1885. By 1891 many denominations held church services in a private hall near the Simla Crescent railway crossing. An Anglican church was built at Boxhill in Khandallah in 1900, and by 1905 Khandallah, Crofton, Kaiwharawhara and Ngauranga formed a separate parochial district.
The first All Saints’ church was constructed in 1907 when land was purchased at the back of the railway station, and the church was used as the town’s first school room. The noise of the passing steam trains soon made it difficult to teach or preach and the site was sold in 1911. A new temporary church was built on the present site in 1912 by T. Page of Khandallah at a cost of £219. The local Anglican congregation soon outgrew this small church building, particularly after the construction of a large railway housing settlement at nearby Tarikaka Street in the 1920s (now a WCC listed Heritage Area).
Diocesan architect, Frederick de Jersey Clere, was asked to prepare plans for a new concrete church in 1921, but the project was delayed due to a lack of funds. Clere and Clere prepared further plans in 1927 and these were modelled on a small brick South Down’s Church from Sussex in England. Clere noted in a letter to the church vestry that ‘the simplicity of the plan would be as popular in Ngaio as it was in Sussex, not only for the aesthetic appeal, but also because “it is more than likely that the Down’s-folk suffered from a want of funds very much as the Ngaio-hill folk are suffering now.’” The church was designed to be increased in size as funding became available and featured a temporary timber chancel or sanctuary (still in use) and removable panels of brickwork to the nave to allow for the construction of the side aisles (that were later installed in c.1963).
The church was completed in January 1929 at a cost of £2,564 by W. Husband, a building contractor who had recently completed the similarly styled All Saints Church in Hataitai. It was dedicated to Bishop Sprott on the 8 February 1929, who noted that this “is the most prominent building in the suburb.” The 1912 church was thereafter used as the church hall.
The new church became central to community celebration, memorials and remembrance. This often took the form of ‘memorial gifts’ including a scroll that lists the names of all Ngaio men who served in WWI, and the church bell, pulpit, clergy stall, prayer desk, communion rail, vestry cabinet, pipe organ, church lounge, reredos and narthex entrance doors. The church bells, donated in memory of Susan Ethel Brandt, are known to have been rung on VE Day to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.
Suburban expansion of Ngaio increased in 1938 when the main trunk route was altered to bypass Johnsonville and the Johnsonville railway was electrified to provide commuter transport. The mortgage debt on the church was repaid in 1939 and the church was consecrated in 1941. The church was altered in c.1963 to designs by Porter and Martin Architects that increased the seating capacity from 180 people to 310 people with the construction of side aisles to the nave, all as foreseen by Clere in the original designs. The contractor was Unit Construction Ltd and the total cost of the project was £10,289 including architect’s fees. A new vicarage was constructed on an adjacent site in 1968 that was designed by Maurice Patience and constructed by J Broekes for the sum of $17, 094. The Parochial District of Ngaio was debt free in 1969 and was confirmed as a separate parish in that year. In 1973-76 work was carried out to upgrade the church hall (the original 1912 church building) and construct a ‘link’ building between the church and the church hall, all designed by Maurice Patience and built by Demic Construction for the sum of $20,640.
The church congregation has reduced in size over the past forty years and All Saints amalgamated with St Barnabas Church in Khandallah in 2006 with combined services held at the Khandallah church. A Final Eucharist service was held at All Saints’ Ngaio on the 20 March 2011 after the church’s structural engineer deemed the building to be earthquake prone. The church was closed, but the timber church lounge and church hall (original 1912 church) remained in use. Church spokesman Richard MacLean noted that ‘a resource consent would be needed to demolish the church,’ but did not go on to state whether the church was at risk of demolition.
Note: This history is an updated version of the WCC Heritage Inventory 2001 with information added from Dick Barber, The Church on the Hill (All Saint’s Church, Ngaio: 1978) and Dick Barber, All Saints’ Church, Ngaio: Parish Jubilee 1906 - 1956, (All Saints’ Church, Ngaio 1956)
