Revelations about the higgledy-piggledy colonised form of Wellington City – as it was inhabited 125 years ago – loom large in historian Elizabeth Cox’s latest big book: Mr Ward’s Map.
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In the last monthly Public History Talk hosted at the National Library for 2025, Cox spoke to a packed auditorium this week about the generational golden gift bestowed by immigrant mapmaker, surveyor and developer Thomas Ward when he devoted the decade of the 1890s to regularly documenting/ mapping the antipodean streets of the city’s Victorian era, and the high utility of his maps ever since.
The result of the near to 90 A1 sized paper map-sheets of incredible detail produced by Ward defies practically any other such enterprise. It’s deserving of being situated alongside the likes of the city-shaping precision delivered for the island of Manhattan by cartographer John Randel Jr.
Every good map has a legend, but how many do what Ward’s mahi does in detailing section numbers, deed lines, construction materials, building heights, the quantum of rooms in a dwelling, and street levels above the H.W.M. (High-Water Mark)? Let alone the location of every electric street light and fire hydrant/ plug. His granular attentions included outdoor longdrops but did omit the placement of hen houses, as agreed in his commissioning with the Wellington City Council.
It’s fascinating to learn that at the start of the 1890s the nation’s capital city held but a mere 30,000 or so people within its Town-Belt-bordered corridor, well before any substantive expansion to the south, east or west or sizeable Harbour Board reclamations.
The city was notably on the cusp of a 30% growth spurt from 1890-1900, putting even more pressure on strained infrastructure and cheek to jowl housing. It was a settlement that was, Cox said, “struggling under its own weight”. Its still evident history was imprinted with the marginalisation of tangata whenua and the struggles of iwi from throughout Aotearoa to pursue a political foothold.
Cox’s entertaining talk began with walking through the decisions that saw her book of Ward’s intensive residential and built-form mapping unfold into life. This covered the eventual pairing of maps, the matching of photographic moments in time and space, the charting of social patterns and poverty, and the surfacing of multiple historical insights into animated community events and vibrant ethnicity. It became an opportunity to show the lives of women and children were far from boring.
Wisely, Cox further enlivened her talk by zooming into the blocks of land use specific to the blocks around Hill Street, Molesworth Street and Parliamentary precinct; complete with the underlying narrative of co-existing hotels, brothels and churches (like the former St Mary’s Cathedral that burnt down in Hill Street in 1898), plus Richard Seddon’s family house (preferred to living in Premier House) and the splendour of the popular Harcourt innercity homestead, plus a diasporic Lebanese community (demeaned and targeted as “artful Assyrians”), plus a curious assortment of uniquely homegrown businesses selling all sorts of long-forgotten wares. Strewn at all points with foundries and factories; because it was a conurbation that was, in equal parts, an industrial ‘manufacturing town’.
Elizabeth Cox has, in close cahoots with Massey University Press publisher Nicola Legat, delivered a more-than-worthy sibling to her 2022 Making Space: A History of New Zealand Women in Architecture.
In Mr Ward’s Map, designed impeccably by local designer Jo Bailey, Cox has underlined the point that just as “a city is more than a map”, a map serves as a gateway and “a baseline for tracing change”.
This 570-page book is a hefty $90 but selling like a hot cake (as any major keepsake should). Four other accompaniments I’d recommend are the much-missed Ben Schrader’s indelible landmark urban history Big Smoke, Redmer Yska’s unforgettable A Strange Beautiful Excitement, a RNZ interview with Elizabeth Cox and the WCC Archive team’s honorific to Pat Lawlor, written by current-day ‘Mr Wellington’ Gábor Tóth.
Also recommended off the back of this book are the digital home that WCC has built for maps (and will be elevating when the renewed public library Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui is opened in 2026), as well as an enlightening free-to-view article on NZ Geographic by Rebekah White titled ‘The Man Who Drew Wellington’.
To close, here’s an excerpt from the NZ GEO article that highlights one of the many local Wellington characters that Elizabeth Cox’s story-telling research has breathed new life into:
“Matilda Meech ran the Te Aro Baths, the only bathing facility available to hundreds of small houses on nearby Te Aro Flat, most of which did not have space for people to wash at home. Meech ran up a red flag during men’s hours at the baths and a blue flag for women. Not only did she organise lessons in “both plain and fancy swimming”, she also chased and hit a man who sexually assaulted her children’s nanny, fought off an attempt by local authorities to repossess the baths, and sued the city council for allowing pollution into the harbour (as it washed into the baths). Eventually, the council caved to Meech’s demands, at which point she sued it for lost income.”
A heroic herstory indeed.
