For the 2021 Beca Heritage Festival, the Richmond History group took our festival display theme as "1890 — Richmond Joins the City".

At the beginning of 1890, Richmond lay outside the Christchurch city boundaries. Since the very beginning of Christchurch, these boundaries were the four town belts — now the four avenues. 

In 1890, Richmond formed part of the Avon Road Board's area. Road boards had been established in Canterbury by the provincial government in 1864. Their name indicates their primary function, but most road boards soon became involved, willingly or not, in a wide range of local government activities. The Avon Road Board managed a large area, between the Avon and Waimakariri rivers. Most of this land was rural, but by the 1880s, a few areas close to the city, like Richmond, were becoming more suburban in nature. People living in these areas were becoming dissatisfied with the services (or lack of them) that the road board could provide.

In late 1889, three Richmond men: Joseph Broadley (a baker), David Cochrane (a painter & decorator) and Walter Langford (a carpenter & undertaker), organised a petition circulated amongst the residents of Richmond, asking for the suburb to become part of the city of Christchurch. The petition is now preserved in the collections of Archives New Zealand/Te Rua Mahara o te Kāwanatanga. 
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In the document below you can read about the petition and the men who organised it, as well as see who signed it. When Richmond did become part of Christchurch city on 30 May 1890, it was the first extension of the city beyond the original town boundaries.

In 1879, George Alfred Buck published a Christchurch and Suburban Directory. The 379-page directory offers a snapshot of Christchurch only 29 years after its founding. At this time there was no suburb of Richmond; this area was known as Bingsland, after Morice Bing (1830–1877) who had owned land in the area. By 1879, Bingsland was becoming more closely settled; the area’s growing population meant Bingsland was included in the directory as one of Christchurch’s suburbs, outside the city area bounded by the four town belts (now the four avenues).

In 1868, a Methodist Church had been established on Stanmore Road, on land donated by Mr Bing. The Bingsland School had opened on its Stanmore Road site in 1875. These developments reflected an increasing local population and were beginning to set the area apart from much of the rest of the largely rural surrounding area.
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In the 14-page document below I have added some more information about the directory and Christchurch at the time. I have also transcribed the names of Bingsland residents from the directory, firstly in name order as they appear in the directory and then in order by street and lastly by occupation, where this has been given (about 10% of entries). Later in the document are some descriptions of the area around this time, followed by a series of newspaper articles transcribed from Papers Past, which illustrate some of the matters concerning Bingsland residents in 1879.

Is Slater Street really named after a creepy-crawlie? Who was Warwick? And whatever happened to Bruce? If you have ever wondered why our streets have the names they do, this document might be of interest.

Margaret Harper and other CCL staff have prepared fifteen documents recording information about the names of Christchurch streets. I have copied some of this material and combined the information about Richmond streets in a single document. My thanks to Christchurch City Libraries for their permission to use the information in this way.

If anyone has more information about any of our local streets, please get in touch; contact Avebury House: email: [email protected]

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.

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.

This photograph was reproduced in Richmond Community News #56, March 2008. Alan Williamson wrote an accompanying article about the property. The original article is available here: www.aveburyhouse.co.nz/uploads/4/7/2/0/47203855/rcn-056-march-2008.pdf

The house at 71 North Avon Road, at the NW corner of the intersection with Stapletons Rd, was converted to include a petrol station in 1927. The property was owned at that time by Norman Baggs, a builder, who kept the property until 1941. The petrol station changed hands several times over the following ten years. In 1952 the property was bought by Alex Levy who operated the station with his son Ross. For some time, Barry Halliday ran an auto repair business alongside the garage in Stapletons Rd.

Later the property was owned by Sonyac Services; there is an advertisement for Sonyac Services in the Pegasus Post, 12 November 1980 special feature on the newly opened North Avon Village shopping centre. Sometime after that the building was decommissioned as a petrol station and was converted to a dry-cleaners. Richmond Drycleaners still operate on the site today (2018). The site still includes a drive-thru feature which is a carry-over from the time when the property was a petrol station.

The photograph includes several signs: one advertising Big Tree petrol; there is at least one Big Tree pump visible under the covered area. There is also a sign offering “Car Service While You Wait”, with “Full Chassis Lubrication” and “Crankcase and Battery Service”, and a sign “Free Air”. The photograph has a label affixed which dates it to ‘circa 1930’, presumably based on the age of the cars and other paraphernalia. In his article, Alan Williamson identifies the vehicles in the photo as a Ford Model T truck with a Dodge Roadster behind and another American sedan on the ramp.

The photograph is a modern inkjet print copy of an original photograph. The print has the date 18/07/2005 printed in the bottom right-hand corner, presumably the date the copy print was made.