Rangiora Shouldn’t Exist! Part 1 – the NZ colonisation

Given the massive size of the Rangiora today, and the unstoppable pace at which it continues to grow, it’s difficult for us in the modern day to realise that Rangiora wasn’t a planned town and was not intended by the authorities to be here at all.

But that is exactly the case. What today is the largest town in North Canterbury and the centre of local commerce and government shouldn’t exist!

This is the first of a two-part post in which I am looking at how Rangiora was founded and how it went against the conventional wisdom of the time.

This first post investigates the general New Zealand settlement by Europeans, and how the land system was supposed to work. Next time I will be looking at how the early Rangiora settlers went against this and created their own town out of nothing!

The concept of how New Zealand should be colonised by European settlers was largely influenced by one Edward Gibbon Wakefield – a philanthropist, philosopher, global traveler, and aspiring politician who had spent time in Canada and Australia observing the British colonisation of those regions.

Wakefield was also an ex-convict who had spent 3 years in jail for abducting and marrying a 15 year old English heiress!

Much has been written on the fascinating life of Wakefield, and I invite you to check out the links here and here.

Wakefield was instrumental in the establishment of the New Zealand Association, and later the New Zealand Company, which were tasked with colonising this new land. It was his models of colonisation that would be the driving force behind how Britain was going the shape this new territory.

On his travels Wakefield had discovered that British colonisation of America, Canada, and Australia hadn’t really gone all that well. In these colonies Britain had enticed settlers to go to the new world by offering them huge tracts of land for very cheap, or even free. This had created a lot of economic and social problems.

• Giving the initial settlers huge tracts of land meant that everyone was a landowner, and no one was a worker. This had led to the importation of criminals and slaves as a means to plug the workforce gap.

• As settlers had to pay their own way to the new colonies this left poorer immigrants open to exploitation by the established landowners who often offered to pay their fares…. in exchange for keeping them on their land as indentured servants.

• It meant that unsustainable towns had a tendency to spring up at the whim of a landowner keen a capitalise on a gold rush or fad. These unregulated towns, built without consideration of their position and access to resources, would inevitably, fail, and then die, causing disruption to the economy. The America’s were already becoming littered with ghost towns.

• The towns and cities had grown of their own accord and often lacked purpose-built schools, churches, and political buildings, limiting the educational prospects of the inhabitants.

• Just giving out large amounts of land as incentives to immigrate, Wakefield felt, had led to an uneducated rabble owning the new territories. It also meant that the colonists didn’t need to work for what they had. This had made the landowners spoilt and unruly.

• As a consequence, the new world, Wakefield felt, was largely governed by riff raff who had no interest in the development of learning, science, morality, and culture in the colonies.

Wakefield’s philosophy instead called for a far more strategic colonisation. Everything was going to have a purpose. Nothing was going to be left to chance.

At the core of Wakefield’s model was the idea that people should have to pay for the land they owned and be expected to work it. This, it was felt, would have several benefits.

• The landowners would be men of financial means – gentlemen keen on moving the territory forward in a far more enlightened way.

• The sale of land by the Crown instead of giving it away would generate a treasury which could then be used to assist poorer immigrants in moving to NZ. This would avoid British citizens being pressed into indentured servitude and would provide the landed gentry with a workforce, so they didn’t need to resort to slavery.

• The assisted immigrants would eventually be able to buy their own land, but as all the cheap land would have been purchased by the gentry they would have to buy in at inflated prices.

• This would ensure that a large workforce, dependant on the landed gentry, would exist for several decades, but it also meant that those assisted migrants that did manage to buy land had worked for it. These were not going to be spoilt riff raff!

• Giving out land in a much more strategic manner meant that the locations of towns and cities could be tightly controlled, avoiding the sprawl of rush towns seen in the America’s and maximising efficiency.

To make all of this work relied on two things – access to cheap land that could be sold at a good profit, and a different way of enticing immigrants to New Zealand.

The land was secured by negotiation with Iwi – who were offered cash for their land and a promise that an amount of said land would be granted back to the Iwi by the Crown for their own exclusive use once surveying had been completed. These “Maori reserves” as they would be known were often centred around Pa, existing villages, and mahinga kai areas.

In the South Island Henry Kemp negotiated with Ngai Tahu chiefs for the purchase of their lands. In 1848 the Canterbury Purchase (aka ‘Kemps Deed’) secured the Crown some 13,551,400 acres of Ngai Tahu land… for an astonishingly low £2000 – or 0.2 pence per acre. (for context – in the 1840s British printers earned about £80 a year, and the smallest coin available was the farthing – worth 0.25 of a penny).

And the promised Maori reserves ended up being a lot smaller than Ngai Tahu expected as well.

The question of how to entice settlers was answered by marketing – an aggressive advertisement campaign that promised settlers a South Pacific paradise. What they found when they arrived was swamps and unbroken land that did not live up to the hype.

But both of this and the Canterbury Purchase are topics that are important enough to warrant their own blog posts.

After the land had been purchased the surveyors set about dividing it into sections. The first priority was to establish the above-mentioned Maori reserves. After this work began surveying out the town sections and rural sections.

Town sections, as the name implies, were parcels of land within the boundaries of the towns and cities. These were small, uniformly shaped, about 1 quarter acre parcels.

British towns and cities had a frustrating problem. They had inherited sprawling, tight, and narrow street layouts from their medieval past, while at the same time the industrial revolution had pushed everyone off the land creating severe over population inside the cramped urban spaces. An urban planning nightmare. This was having significant impacts on public health and on commerce as congestion impacted travel.

New Zealand’s settlements were to be modern, well laid out, affairs.

• Towns and cities were to be purposefully designed on paper in England by professional surveyors to the very best urban planning and surveying standards available at the time.

• Roads were to be wide with a set width of 1 chain (20.12m), ensuring that they could handle modern (at the time) traffic loads.

• Settlements were to be laid out in logical uniform blocks. Roads were going to be parallel, and intersections perfectly aligned to maximise efficiency.

• Land would be purposefully set reserved within them for churches and schools.

• Settlements would be made up of town sections. These were going to be a standard size of about 1 quarter acre (0.1 hectares).

• This gave people plenty of space to build a shop or house and grow their own crops in the back yard, avoiding the overcrowding and hardships of the old-world cities.

The plans for the towns and cities would then be brought to New Zealand, and surveyors would start the process of laying them out on the ground.

But the towns and cities drawn up by these urban planners could not be laid out just anywhere. They needed purpose.

The cities were to be located to maximise commerce, at the mouths of major ports, and would be the centres of heavy industry.

Towns were to be placed to maximise resource harvesting, acting as marketplaces and places of commerce outside of the cities. They would be strategically placed on main roads or at river mouths to maximise the gathering of resources into one place, and the transport of those resources to the cities.

And to this end land would be purposefully identified and set aside for these planned settlements. The roads, education and church reserves, and town sections would be surveyed out.

The land outside the towns was divided into rural sections. These were large sections of at least 50 acres (about 20 hectares), although their size varied greatly. These were intended to be developed into farms, forestry, mines, quarries, and other industries.

The size of the rural sections was deliberate. They were large enough for the owners to return a profit on their investment, but small enough that they could be worked by a small team of men – avoiding the workforce pressure that had led to slavery in other territories.

The small size of the rural sections, and dividing up all the land into sections, also meant that it was unlikely that no one person would own enough land to establish their own town. This would avoid the rush towns seen in the America’s and ensure that commerce was concentrated in the purpose-built towns.

To buy a rural section a purchaser would select the section they wanted from the survey plan of the area. It was a first-come-first-served system, and there was a rush on the premium sections that contained forest as there was a lot of money in selling the logs.

After purchase of your rural section, you had one year to develop it. For most this would usually mean clearing it of scrub, draining it, and putting livestock or crops on it.

By contrast, town sections were allocated by ballot.

Finally, while anyone could purchase a rural section, in order to buy a town section you had to also purchase a rural section. This ensured that the rural sections around the towns and cities would be developed quickly, and would create a ready supply of food and materials for the local economy.

In the 1850s you could buy a double town section in Christchurch for £24 and a 50 acre rural section for £150 – with each additional acre being £3. Really hitting home that the price paid to Ngai Tahu for the land wasn’t great.

Villages, for the most part, were not planned in advance by the New Zealand Company or the organisations that came after it and no land was set aside for them. But this was by design.

Typically, the only amenities that were provided to the rural sections by the authorities were roads.

Main roads were surveyed to connect the planned towns to the cities. In the South Island these typically ran the length of the island following the coast. Branch roads came off the main road and made there way into the interior. These were commonly referred to as “dray roads” after the heavy-duty carts that used them.

Roads were also surveyed between the rural sections. These were the standard road width of 1 chain and connected to the local dray road. But only the minimum number of roads would be surveyed. Just enough so that each rural section connected to at least one.

Farmers and other resources owners would take their produce to the local town for sale by dray, using the local dray road to connect to the main road. The towns in turn would move the produce on to the cities.

These surveyed rural roads would be formed and maintained by the local authority (The New Zealand Company, its successors, and later the Provincial Governments) as the land around them was sold. These roads would remain in the ownership of the government.

But once you owned a town or rural section you were allowed to subdivide it as you wished. With very few restrictions.

This was part of Wakefield’s plan. Land sales would give the assisted immigrants something to work towards, and, in theory, working to own their land would teach them to appreciate what they had and make them more enlightened and genteel.

(I will leave it up to the reader to decide if Wakefield’s plan was successful in making NZ enlightened or not.)

And so, while they weren’t planned, small rural villages were expected to pop up here and there to service the local farming, forestry, mining, or other resource gathering communities. Perhaps with a pub, blacksmith, general store, and houses for the labourers. Just the necessities.

But the land for these buildings would have to be subdivided out by the owners of the rural sections from their own personal land holdings. This meant villages would only appear where they really needed to be. And would remain small as every piece of land a landowner sold was land that they couldn’t work and earn a living from.

The rural sections system also meant that the towns and cities could grow organically.

The size of the rural sections meant that it was unlikely that any one person would control all the land around a settlement, and therefore no one person would have the sole control of where a city could expand into. The fact that the rural sections could be subdivided without much restriction meant that they could start out as farms, providing easily accessible food and employment when the settlement was small, but could be easily converted into housing lots when needed.

This could be very lucrative as the towns inevitably grew.

The New Zealand Company hit financial difficulties in 1843, returned it’s Crown charter in 1850, and folded completely in 1858.

1848 saw the formation of the Canterbury Association, spearheaded by Wakefield and John Robert Godley. The Canterbury Association purchased the Canterbury land from the New Zealand Company that Kemp had secured from Ngai Tahu. They then set about forming the Canterbury colony under Wakefield’s model.

Christchurch was placed due to its proximity to Lyttleton harbour, while the Avon would provide the power necessary to run heavy machinery, and the swampy land around the settlement provided resources for brick making.

The main road was formed along the coast. On paper this road went the full length of the province, but the red map series shows that in 1860 it had only been formed as far north as the Ashley River. Much of this still exists today as State Highway 1.

To the west Lyttleton was planned out to be the main port town. To the south Timaru was planned as another port.

To the north Kaiapoi was the planned market town for this part of Canterbury. Its position allowed it to function as a ferry crossing over the river and as a port – the river mouth giving excellent access to the ocean.

Land was set aside, and plans were drawn up.

Further north the villages of Waikuku and Woodend grew along the main road to serve the faming communities in those areas. These were formed by the farmers subdividing off parts of their holdings. To the east Ohoka grew the same way along a dray road.

Looking at the early survey maps of Rangiora the thing you will notice right away is that there isn’t a town section in sight. No evenly laid out blocks. No residential sections. No perfectly aligned roading grid set out by surveyors.

The area that Rangiora now sits on was entirely rural sections – and was intended to be farmland.

And from the point of view of an urban planner in London why would it be anything else? There are no resources here to exploit. The Ashley River isn’t useful as a port. It isn’t even on the main road!

Rangiora was the middle of nowhere.

Looking at the maps above you will notice that the only roads that were planned by surveyors in what is now the town centre were portions of White Street, Victoria Street, Johns Road, and Percival Street.

Further out what is today East Belt, West Belt, Pentecost Road, and Townsend Road are also on the plan – although these are only paper roads and haven’t been formed.

But you will also notice that these roads are all placed between the rural sections. These are country roads planned out to ensure all the rural sections, and the farms that were intended to be on them, could be accessed. They all connect to High Street, ensuring that the farmers can get to market… in Kaiapoi.

Speaking of High Street – what would become High Street and Rangiora Woodend Road is also present on the Black Map. This was originally a dray road, and in the 1850s was the only way to and from Rangiora. While what is today Lineside Road had been surveyed it ran through a very wet swamp that existed between Rangiora and Kaiapoi that the authorities did not want to spend the money draining.

Rangiora in the 1850s was a very different place than it is today. Far from being a town, it was isolated farmland in the middle of nowhere. Difficult to get too, and without direct access to market.

And under Wakefield’s plan it should have stayed that way. Perhaps with a small village with a couple of shops. But its purpose was farming.

The thing is though… the rural section system meant that a group of landowners could create their own town by coming together and strategically subdividing their rural sections. Creating a town of their own design without the urban planning oversight of London, in a place it wasn’t meant to be……..

And on that cliff hanger I will leave the rest of the story for part 2!