John Hickling, has recently loaned us a family photo album which includes pictures of the family’s tomato-growing business in Richmond, between River Road & Dudley Creek. Few of the photos have dates recorded, but seem to be taken mostly before 1950. 

About 1925, John’s grandfather, William Hickling (1886–1967) bought two acres of land in North Richmond, west of Dudley Creek near its confluence with the Avon River. The purchase must have seemed a good deal to him, because the previous year he had owned an acre of land in Papanui, which included a house and four glasshouses growing tomatoes, along with other horticultural infrastructure.
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The Hickling family would live at the Richmond property for the next 50 years. As these photos show, the business the family developed here became a considerable enterprise. When William retired in the 1950s, his son Arthur (1920–2000) took over the business, in partnership with his sisters and their husbands. Later, when North Island tomato growers began flooding South Island markets with cheaper tomatoes grown outdoors, the family switched to growing carnations. Arthur sold the property in the mid-1970s and went on to sell real estate with Drewery’s Estate Agency in Christchurch.

​William Hickling and his wife Agnes were married in Birmingham, England in March, 1909. They must have emigrated to New Zealand soon after, as their first child, Ivy Lillian, was born in New Zealand in 1910. The couple would have two more children: Elsie, b 1913 and Arthur, b 1920. From 1925, the family lived at 389 River Road. William established the property, building glasshouses for growing tomatoes. 

The photo above shows the old shops on the western side of Stanmore Rd near the intersection with North Avon Rd in the late 1970s. These buildings were demolished soon after to make way for the construction of Richmond Village.

The four-page document below contains transcriptions of two letters written by Roy Burn, proprietor of the North Avon Shoe Store Ltd, 333 Stanmore Rd. Pages 1 & 2 give the text of a hand-written document prepared in 1980. Roy appended a note at the end: “1980 on the opening of the new Richmond Village”. The document provides a potted history of many businesses in the commercial area at the north end of Stanmore Rd, over many years of 20th century. It may help readers locate some of the businesses mentioned in the document, to refer to the 1940 Stanmore Rd map prepared by Noeline Hansen and Shona Ward — see the item “Stanmore Road, Richmond — 1940” below on this page.

On p3 is another letter from Roy Burn about the same time, when the new Richmond Village opened at the corner of Stanmore & North Avon Rds. This letter outlines in more detail the story of the shoe repair business at 327 Stanmore Rd, taken over by Roy Burn’s father, Albert, in 1928 and how this developed into the shoe retail business at 333 Stanmore. This letter and short introduction were printed in the August 2006 issue of the Richmond Community News (Issue 39).

The final page includes a map graphic advertising the North Avon shopping centre and its mix of businesses. This is dated 1972 in a handwritten note on the reverse.

The original documents are housed in the Richmond Room at Avebury house, along with much other material covering the history of the Richmond area. The document was transcribed by David Hollander, July 2018. The transcription has been edited lightly; correcting spelling and punctuation, but otherwise leaving the document as it was written.

These two photographs are part of the local history collection at Avebury House. They show two views, exterior and interior, of Gerrie's Fruiterer & Confectioner on Stanmore Rd. The typed note accompanying these photographs states, “323 Stanmore Rd, 1927”, but Stones Directory gives the address as 325 Stanmore Rd, where George Gerrie had a confectioner’s shop in 1927.

The PDF document includes some more information about the business and the building on the south corner of Stanmore Rd and Avalon St.

This great piece of work, labelled “Richmond Village”, shows the layout of sections along the north end of Stanmore Road c.1940. North is at the right. The stretch of Stanmore Road runs from the corner of Draper St and Swanns Rd to its northern end at the intersection with North Avon Rd. The data was researched by Noeline Hansen and Shona Ward who were very active in the Richmond History Group based at Avebury House in the years before the earthquakes. The map was drawn by Ken Washington. The original document is large: 2500 x 460 mm and is on display in the Richmond Room, upstairs at Avebury House, 9 Eveleyn Couzins Ave.

On the map, residences are coloured pink and commercial properties are blue. Utilities are indicated in yellow. Where the residential occupiers (not necessarily the owners) of the properties have been identified, their names and occupation, if known, have been shown. Businesses show the name of the owner and the type of enterprise. The map makes for fascinating reading. As late as 1940 there are two blacksmiths in this one stretch of Stanmore Rd.

There is a post office marked at 323 Stanmore Rd. This building had previously been occupied by a fruiterer business — there are two photos of this shop dated 1927 in the history group collection at Avebury House. A section is shown as having been set aside for the construction of a post office on the eastern corner of Stanmore and North Avon Rds, but this was never built.

Bruce St used to connect Stanmore Rd and Pavitt St. The roadway still exists as a driveway immediately south of the St. Vincent de Paul building on Stanmore Rd, but sometime after 1954 (Bruce St appears in a Christchurch map of that date), the name was dropped and the road is not marked on modern maps. In 1940, the site of the St. Vincent de Paul shop was occupied by Morgan Davies, a cobbler, with Aldersley’s bakery immediately behind that to the west.

The butcher, Eric McPherson, moved from 321 Stanmore Rd, as shown on the map, to the shop at 75 North Avon Rd (at the north end of Stanmore Rd) in 1940.1

For many years there was a suburban police station at 245 Stanmore, known as Bingsland police station; the name was a carry-over from the earliest days of settlement in the area. The station, which was opened in 1879, retained that name until 1957, when it was changed to ‘North Avon’. The station moved to new premises at 45 North Parade in 1963, but the North Avon station closed altogether in 1968.2


Click on the picture above to see the map in detail.

Notes:
1  Interview with Noeline Hansen (née McPherson), Eric’s daughter.
2  Thomson, Barry, 1989. “Sharing the Challenge — A Social and Pictorial History of the Christchurch Police District”, pp146–7.

This auction poster announces the residential development of land along Shirley Rd and Stapletons Rd in 1925. The area north of North Avon Road became part of Christchurch City in 1914 but was still largely farmland at this time.

Judging by handwritten notes on the poster, sales had been brisk; thirty-one of the fifty-one sections have been marked “Sold”. Some things, it seems, never change; real estate developers’ hyperbole for one thing. The sections are advertised as being ‘exceptionally high, well drained, beautiful soil, easily worked, will grow anything.’ Furthermore, they get ‘all the sun that shines.’ Presumably sections in other developments do not!?

The original poster for Jones, McCrostie Auctioneers Ltd measures 570 x 790 mm. The PDF document below has an A4 reproduction and a page of text giving some context to the development.