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Queen Street upgrade

Project summary | Mobility parking | Consultation | Budget and funding | Trees | | Artworks | Urban design | Heritage | Auckland's CBD Into the future strategy | CBD retail strategy | Facts | History of Queen Street | Reducing the speed limit

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Heritage

• Queen Street is an ancient trackway, and one of the oldest streets in Auckland.
• Its built heritage started in 1841 and it has always been a retail and business centre. As a consequence, it has a long and rich history that deserves celebration in the upgrade plans for the street.
• City Heritage Manager George Farrant has worked with the designers to ensure that a celebration of the past can be achieved in the upgrade.
• Special areas and points of heritage interest along Queen Street will be identified with text engraved into the stone paving, so the city's heritage can be more widely shared with residents and visitors.
• Elements from the current street, like the red chip pavers, will be woven into the new paving surface. to maintain a sense of continuity and contact with our history. The new design incorporates areas of re-used red-chip paving denoting pedestrian seating and 'pause' areas.
• The built heritage of the valley is particularly rich and there are 30 scheduled items in Queen Street.
• The Town Hall, a Category 'A' building, is protected by a 20 metre "scheduled surrounds" zone. In this area, above-ground features will be strictly limited to allow the Town Hall to be appreciated in an unobstructed way.
• The use of hand-made basalt kerbs (many of them products of early 'hard labour' sessions in the Mount Eden prison yards) has always been a key signature of Queen Street.
• Many of these stones still carry the circular imprints where early cast-iron verandah posts once stood - as indeed they still do outside the highly-protected Victorian shops opposite Myers Park at the top the street - and these kerbs are being retained as part of the stage four design.
• Highlight areas in front of significant heritage sites will be paved in smaller square basalt cobbles (similar to those outside the Old Chief Post Office), and within the cobbled panels text explaining the adjacent points of interest will be engraved.
• A significant 'touch-point' with the city's very early natural history is the exact location of the original high tide line across Queen Street, close to Fort and Shortland Streets. Special lines of different stone are proposed to be laid to delineate the curving line of the original 1840 shoreline.
• The corner of Shortland and Queen streets is listed in Auckland City's District Plan as a Maori heritage site - "Te Whatu" a canoe mooring site registered by Ngati Paoa.
• The Wai Horotiu was the original stream that drained the Queen Street valley. It was channelled and named the Ligar Canal before it was culverted beneath the pavements. As a reference to this once-pristine stream, white tile motifs will be placed in the new basalt paving to denote the whitebait that once made the creek their home.