Stanmore Road, Richmond — 1940

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.