Former hotel on the corner where pub­lic life gathered

Roselyn Fauth

​What hap­pens when you put a hotel oppos­ite a court­house?

At the inter­sec­tion of North and Barn­ard streets, Timaru still has the answer.

On one side stands the Timaru Court­house, built in 1877-78 to the design of Colo­nial Archi­tect W H Clayton, with the police sta­tion beside it: formal pub­lic order and judg­ment.

On the other stands the former Queen’s Hotel, now closed: once beds, meals, beer, for the informal life of loc­als and the vis­it­ors who no doubt enjoyed a yarn and gos­sip with the pub­lic­ans.

The court­house and hotel rose almost together. The Queen’s Hotel opened on Octo­ber 1, 1878, with Thomas Bell Jones as its first pub­lican. It was designed by Thomas Machin and built by J Simpson, using brick and cement plaster.

As one of the older sur­viv­ing com­mer­cial hotel build­ings in Timaru’s cent­ral busi­ness dis­trict, it helps us read a layer of town life that has changed, if not largely dis­ap­peared.

Machin is the thread from last week’s column. At the former Timaru and Glad­stone Board of Works build­ing, com­pleted in 1874, he had been the con­tractor, work­ing to Thomas Roberts’ design in Timaru blue­stone.

Four years later, at the Queen’s Hotel, Machin appears as archi­tect.

This is an inter­est­ing shift, as it was at a time before archi­tects had the formal regis­tra­tion sys­tem we know today.

Skilled build­ers could move into design, and Machin would have under­stood build­ings from the inside out.

The build­ing is two-storey, erec­ted in a com­mer­cial clas­si­cism style, with a foot­print shaped by its corner site.

Its has a rus­tic­ated ground floor, arch-headed sash win­dows and a simple cor­nice. The above-the-para­pet is inter­est­ing to me, as is the ped­i­ment is a curi­ous cir­cu­lar open­ing.

A c.1885 pho­to­graph in the South Can­ter­bury Museum col­lec­tion shows a horse-drawn cart out­side the hotel, with a woman hold­ing an infant and a child nearby. It reminds us this corner was part of ordin­ary fam­ily, trans­port and street life too.

Today, accom­mod­a­tion, res­taur­ants, bars and cafés are often sep­ar­ate things. In the 19th cen­tury, a pub­lic house gathered many of those func­tions under one roof. It could offer alco­hol, meals, lodging, shel­ter, stabling for horses, spaces for meet­ings and a lay­over when tra­vers­ing the region was lim­ited to how far a horse could travel before it needed a rest. New Zea­l­and had liquor licens­ing from 1842, and in Can­ter­bury pub­lic houses were reg­u­lated by pro­vin­cial law before national rules took over.

From 1881, pub­lic houses selling liquor were required to provide meals and at least six bed­rooms for trav­el­lers.

But hotels were also con­tested spaces, and while alco­hol was part of social life, tem­per­ance cam­paign­ers, includ­ing many women, wor­ried about fam­il­ies, poverty and harm, and chal­lenged the place of drink in pub­lic life.

Later came licens­ing debates, pro­hib­i­tion cam­paigns and six o’clock clos­ing, remembered through the hur­ried drink­ing cul­ture of secret knocks on back doors and the “six o’clock swill”.

North St marked the join between Gov­ern­ment Town to the south and Rhodes Town to the north, which helps explain why some nearby streets still meet awk­wardly.

So this corner is not only a former hotel site. It is where justice, hos­pit­al­ity, town plan­ning, alco­hol his­tory and every­day pub­lic life met.

Next time you pass Barn­ard and North streets, look up at the corner, ima­gine being a fly on the wall and all the con­ver­sa­tions these walls must have accom­mod­ated, fed and watered.

Brought to you by the Timaru Civic Trust, cel­eb­rat­ing our built her­it­age and the people who keep it alive.