From a dingy bus depot to a place for people: Britomart's two decades of transformation.

MATTHEW COCKRAM CHIEF EXECUTIVE, COOPER AND COMPANY

In the mid-90s, I used to come to a chiropractor who had a studio in the Northern Steamship Building on Quay Street. I walked from Shortland Street through the maelstrom of Britomart’s bus stop, a car park and dilapidated old buildings. I would never have even thought of working in this area. It wasn’t a place that really left an impression. 

NGARIMU BLAIR NGĀTI WHĀTUA ŌRĀKEI

I was a 90s teenager, and Britomart was a pretty rough-and-tumble place back then. There were two spacies parlours down in Britomart, and I had a lot of fun there. But you had to be really aware of your safety because something like a street fight could happen – we had a wave of American-style gang culture off the back of hip-hop happening then. I was definitely always on high alert as a brown teenager. My older cousins and aunties and uncles would also talk about the old Schooner pub on Quay Street as being fun times but also some violent times as well.

KAREN WALKER FASHION DESIGNER AND BRITOMART RETAILER

You might think twice about going to the Britomart bus depot after dark. It was a wind tunnel – cold and dark even on a sunny day. My memory of it is dominated by the buses and the dim light. You could see there were great buildings underneath it all, but you were just so focused on getting on a bus and getting out of there you didn’t have time to really look.

LONNIE HUTCHINSON ARTIST  

[Artist] Lisa Reihana talked about a studio in Britomart I might want to share with her [in Excelsior House on Customs Street East]. There was this roller door that you’d put up and then you’d walk through the dark – there was no lighting, and tagging everywhere. It was quite full-on. But we had this huge studio space with windows that faced out towards the harbour. Heather Straka had a studio there, and Peter Robinson – quite a few people. But you didn’t see the other artists very much. We were like ships in the night, so I used to talk to the girls at the strip club across the road because they had a caravan there in the winter where you could go and have a cigarette.

PIP CHESHIRE CHESHIRE ARCHITECTS  

Britomart was cold and wet and you had to wear big builder’s boots because it was rough. There were birds and dead rats and remnants left behind from people living there. I went through all the buildings one day, up and down, and it was just miserable.

NAT CHESHIRE CHESHIRE ARCHITECTS

I remember the surveyors coming back from one of the buildings and reporting that they couldn’t give us the finished floor level because they couldn’t find the floor; it was buried under too many rat bodies and mattresses and condoms and everything else. A year or two later, standing in the window of our studio overlooking Britomart, I watched a man walking across the gravel pit in the middle carrying two plastic supermarket shopping bags. I turned to our team and said, “There’s somebody in Britomart! There is somebody here!” At that stage it barely seemed possible that we could make Britomart into what we collectively imagined of it.

Below: Slide to compare Britomart in 1957 with a view from 2004. In 1957, Britomart was dominated by the Municipal Transport Centre for buses at its centre, and a multi-storey concrete carpark was beginning construction. The view in 2024 is quite different, with the Westpac and EY Building occupying the space of the former carpark, with Takutai Square in front. 1957 photo by Whites Aviation, WA-44136, Alexander Turnbull Library. 2004 photo by Samuel Hartnett. 

BILL MCKAY SENIOR LECTURER, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING, UNIVERSITY OF AUCKLAND WAIPAPA TAUMATA RAU

During the 80s it was like an economic cyclone was blowing through Auckland, and a lot of heritage buildings got knocked down. There were umpteen different schemes for the Britomart area: everyone was working on a proposal, and they all involved maximising the amount of floor area for offices. I was working for Manning Mitchell Architects and we designed a proposal in conjunction with Lane Priest Architects (the tall golden building below) that had five different high-rises designed by different architects on a podium running through the entire Britomart site.

MATTHEW COCKRAM CHIEF EXECUTIVE, COOPER AND COMPANY

In the mid-90s, I was a lawyer acting for the financiers behind a local development consortium, which was led by a guy named Jihong Lu. He and Peter Cross from Auckland City Council had been actively out in the market with a scheme that was designed to commercialise everything above and around Britomart in order to be able to fund and sustain the really substantial public transport project that the council were thinking about at that time. The scheme had three levels of underground car parking, an underground bus station along with the railway station, and part of Quay Street was underground to offer a connection to the water (below). But in order for that to work, you had to commercialise everything above, pretty much bowling all the heritage buildings and doing this downtown Kowloon-type scheme. 

I could see this was an amazing piece of land right on the waterfront [but] the whole deal became really tricky. It was a bit heroic in terms of its assumptions about how much could be made from the above-ground stuff and the timeframe around the takeup of it. There were a lot of square metres of office and a lot of residential. Eventually that client fell away along with that scheme; Christine Fletcher came in as mayor and took most of her term to kill it, which was a good thing. 

CHRISTINE FLETCHER AUCKLAND MAYOR, 1998-20016

The [Jihong Lu] proposal would have forever closed off the opportunity to build a city rail link on the Britomart site. It would also have meant drastic loss of heritage and an obscuring of Auckland’s beautiful and precious waterfront. I and many others found the proposal unacceptable. At the time I was a Member of Parliament and I made it my mission to be in Wellington as an advocate.

In Auckland, we destroyed so much heritage. In the 1980s, the Flash Harrys came to town and built all these mirrored buildings. They were just cowboys. And I’d seen enough cowboys that I wasn’t going to let that happen to something I loved. I was passionate about heritage and knew that if Britomart could bring rail and people back into the centre of the city then it would be economically attractive and sustainable to restore and repurpose the beautiful heritage buildings that surrounded it. I argued that heritage would be a drawcard for the downtown business area and allowed my name to be put forward as an independent Auckland mayoral candidate on a platform of rethinking Britomart.

PIP CHESHIRE CHESHIRE ARCHITECTS 

I was not very involved in the protest action. There was an organisation that became Urban Auckland that was essentially driven by Amanda Reynolds and a few others, trying to protect the lower city and its connection to the waterfront, and who used the heritage buildings as a kind of lever in the Environment Court. The mayoralty fell essentially on that issue. That was the last time architecture really was a blood sport up here.

Below left: A 1990s redevelopment plan for Britomart that was led by developer Jihong Lu, who eventually became bankrupt with the scheme unrealised. Below right: A 1980s proposal by Manning Mitchell Architects and Lane Priest Architects, one of a host of high-rises planned for the site. 

CHRISTINE FLETCHER AUCKLAND MAYOR, 1998-2001

Continual threats of legal action in the background, including civil action against me personally, were demoralising but I took the gamble that the developer [Jihong Lu] would be unable to meet contractual deadlines. I was right but while all of it played out, I fell out of favour with my supporters. They believed I had betrayed them by going through with the existing contracts. Little did they know behind the scenes I was carefully and tactically planning an alternative scheme, ready to go when the developer did eventually default, which was able to use existing consents. 

I appointed Grant Kirby to deliver the project based on an inclusive urban design competition. We took over the Chief Post Office and appointed Suzanne Sinclair with a large team of staff to invite in the public, including school groups, key stakeholders and the National Council of Women. They viewed information boards and identified the key themes Council should address as part of a brief for Britomart. This information-gathering process ran for nearly two months. Enormous numbers of people came, some to see the old Post Office, which had been shut and left destitute, but most importantly to be involved in the development of Britomart. From this, a brief was developed and reported to the council.

ROBIN BYRON SENIOR CONSERVATION ARCHITECT, HERITAGE NEW ZEALAND POUHERE TAONGA

I think heritage protection is really important as a way to establish a sense of place. I think it’s about understanding the evolution of the city, what characterises the city and a part of our shared history. Of course it’s very prominent along the waterfront. Britomart is a really significant area of the city connected with the major institutions, like the former Post Office, the Ferry Building, and the whole transport area. It really connects people with where they came from and what the identity of their city is.

Below: Slide to compare Britomart in 1994 with the same view from the back of the Chief Post Office/Waitematā Station. The Art Deco extension to the former Chief Post Office was demolished as part of its transition to the Britomart Transport Centre, as was the multi-storey carpark at the rear of the 1994 photo. Photo at left, Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections, 355786. Photo at right by Samuel Hartnett. 

PIP CHESHIRE CHESHIRE ARCHITECTS

One of the finalists of the first stage of the competition was [architect] Mario Madayag. I was running Jasmax at that stage and our scheme was a very wild scheme because I didn’t trust the Auckland City Council to run a competition. I thought that it wasn’t a real competition – foolishly, really. The night the five finalists were announced, we took Mario out to dinner and said, “You’re a man alone, you need support.” So at that stage, Jasmax and Mario came together. Jasmax’s Greg Boyden was the director in charge for the rail station. I was managing the company, so I was a kind of critic and reviewer, but that was about it.

CHRISTINE FLETCHER AUCKLAND MAYOR, 1998-2001

The combined Mario Madayag/Jasmax proposal was then refined and designed to include the underground train station and the at-grade street system and bus interchange facilities, and the upgrade to Queen Elizabeth Square. Post-contract, the first tranche was the underground tunnel from Quay Park into Britomart Place. This was the mechanism that would unlock Britomart. This was signed on the eve of the election I lost.

JOHN BANKS AUCKLAND MAYOR, 2001-2004 AND 2007-2010 

I have vivid memories of the project. I give credit to Christine Fletcher because it was her vision and her council before me that bought the 19 heritage buildings that make up Britomart. I inherited a gold nugget. We drove down Queen Street in a horse-drawn carriage with the great Sir Edmund Hillary and opened the new train station. From there it was about how do we best continue momentum and build the dream? The dream was all of those buildings being fabulously restored to their former glory and utilised to form a precinct – not just for Auckland and downtown Queen Street, but as a destination for New Zealanders. 

Construction began on the $200 million underground train station in October 2001. In 2002, the Auckland City Council put a call out for proposals to develop the 6.5-hectare Britomart area, with submissions closing at the end of the year. By July 2003, the original 14 submissions from around the world had been narrowed down to two contenders, one of which was a three-way consortium led by Peter Cooper, in partnership with Phillimore Properties and construction company Multiplex (both of whom were later bought out by Cooper and Company). In November 2003, the consortium, known as Bluewater, won the tender. The Britomart Development Deed was signed in April 2004. 

PETER COOPER Executive Chairman, Cooper and Company 

I had moved to America, but I was flying backwards and forwards a lot to see my mother, who was in her mid-90s and living in Auckland. I thought, ‘I have to be down there, so why don’t I try and do something business-wise that would help pay my airfare?’ I was kicking tyres, looking for a building to buy and redevelop. 

I came upon Britomart when the train station was still being built underneath. It was just abandoned buildings with seagulls and squatters and no tenants, and I thought it looked like an amazing opportunity, especially in terms of its location. I went to the city council to talk to them about it, and their idea at the time was to build another carpark and sell off the individual buildings. I said that would be a sin. I’d just developed Southlake Town Square in Texas [a town built from scratch near Dallas, below], so in Britomart I saw the most amazing opportunity to create a heritage precinct. The council thought the concept was interesting, so I spent two years advocating for it and working with them on developing the concept. So I was furious when the council decided to put together a proposal themselves and publicly ask for development applications. But obviously, I decided I’d go for it. 

JOHN BANKS AUCKLAND MAYOR, 2001-2004 AND 2007-2010 

Most developers thought it was just too hard. I think the so-called developer community had had a cavalier attitude towards conservation and a greed-driven mandate for money-making prior to Britomart. A lot of the buildings we have now in place of great early settlement buildings stand as a monument to bad taste. Auckland’s development has been done by flash Freds and fly-by-night operators who are long gone and well broke. In Britomart, there were two serious contenders, Peter Cooper and another man whose name has just vanished off my radar12, but whom council overwhelmingly was in support of. Peter Cooper was easily the smartest of the two, a visionary and a role model developer. I suggested to Peter that he take some of our councillors up to Texas to see some of his work [at Southlake Town Square]. The rest became history. They came back overwhelmingly enthusiastic that Peter Cooper should pick up the project. No one else in the mix could have put this destination together. Only Peter Cooper had the experience, energy and vision to go the distance. Those decisions taken a quarter of a century ago are as right today as they were smart then.

PETER COOPER Executive Chairman, Cooper and Company

Southlake Town Square is an open-air shopping and office precinct near Dallas built around a large town square for hosting events. What we did was pretty bold: we bought about 130 acres. The surrounding area was quite a wealthy residential hub that had no retail or commercial centre at all, so all of those sales tax dollars were leaching out of the hands of the community. I proposed to the local council that we create a tax district where they would pay for 40 percent of all the infrastructure, with the promise that the tax dollars they would earn from the retail we created would more than compensate them for their commitment. This has happened and we have now created the commercial and community centre for the city. We also enticed the council to create their own Town Hall and other amenities. It all worked out extremely well for them, which a lot of people didn’t expect. I was told by mall developers in the US that no one would ever walk as far as I was contemplating in Southlake, with its large open-air spaces. But there was a romance to me in terms of people walking through a park and having music playing and going shopping and eating and drinking at the same time. Now no one builds regional malls, and outdoor “entertainment centres” are really the new norm. Southlake has been incredibly successful. It gave me the confidence to do what we did here at Britomart.

Below: A view of Southlake Town Square, a town centre developed around an open square for events and activities near the Dallas Fort Worth Airport by Peter Cooper before the regeneration of Britomart. The development gave Cooper the confidence to reimagine Britomart, and gave Auckland City Council the confidence to choose him as the successful tenderer for redevelopment rights. 

PETER COOPER Executive Chairman, Cooper and Company 

I first practiced this idea with Southlake Town Square, which as a place is driven by events, so I was able to also think about Britomart from an events point of view. Early on, we doubled the size of Takutai Square on the master plan to give that space to the public. I’d spent a lot of time looking at squares in Italy, and they were always my philosophical ideal of how people lived, by going to the square to have a cup of coffee and meet and talk; it was a community gathering place, the essence of human interaction. We used some of those squares as models to figure out dimensions and size of spaces. The biggest driver in my head was that it was the start of this new era where people were able to work from home on their computers and carry their phones with them. It seemed to me that what people needed to make this transition was the experience of gathering. We all need to have that feeling of being part of society and being able to talk to each other and get together. 

MATTHEW COCKRAM Chief Executive, Cooper and Company

It was such a big, neglected area in a prime spot that anything we did was going to be better. Takutai Square was pretty much resolved by the time I came along. I think it’s an intangible feature of a precinct: if you control a whole lot of land that has public space interspersed through it, it’s really important that you have some influence on that space, because it so affects the quality of the experience that people have. And it does have a value effect. The ambience of those public spaces – the general environment, the cleanliness, the security – very much contributes to the whole Britomart thing. We also had Te Rou Kai, the fountain in Takutai Square by Ngāti Whātua artists, which beautifully refers to the original foreshore and is also, in a way, a visible marker of our friendship with the hapū, who are of course mana whenua but also our neighbours at Te Tōangaroa. They have blessed our buildings as they’ve opened, named some of our laneways, and contributed enormously to the development of Britomart and the city as a whole. 

NGARIMU BLAIR Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei

I was 22 or 23 years old and my job was being the conduit between Ngāti Whātua and the local councils in Auckland, and the tribe were invited onto the judging panel for the competition for the design of Britomart Station and the masterplan of the area around it. Ian Athfield was one of the judges, so it was pretty special for me to be able to listen to him talk about architecture and space and rip apart these entries. He held the room. We ended up picking Mario Madayag, and my job was to start connecting him and Jasmax with some of our creatives and cultural experts. That led to the backbone through Britomart, the central axis of Te Ara Tāhuhu – the cultural framework for that is that it’s the backbone of a meeting house. We also wanted nature to break through this concrete landscape, which is why water comes through in Te Rou Kai (below), the fountain in Takutai Square by Ngāti Whātua artists. One of our iconic shellfish is a toheroa, which is the shell inset you can see in some of the paving around Britomart, another thing to remind people that this was the seabed.

SARAH HULL Marketing Director, Cooper and Company 

My first job here was writing an event strategy for the open space in the centre and for some of the buildings that were empty, which was most of them. I could see the beauty in the buildings underneath everything. The spaces were very rudimentary, but very cool for parties and events. The first lease was to Auckland Theatre Company, then the Auckland Festival and a few other arts organisations. We could legitimately give them pretty cheap rent, so they didn’t care that it was grungy. We also used to have rehearsal spaces and studios, which were very rough and ready. 

NEIL IEREMIA Founding Director, Black Grace Dance Company 

Black Grace leased the top floor of the Barrington Building and not too long after we moved in, a communications company moved in below us. The only thing that separated us were old floorboards, and as soon as we started jumping and moving around it drove them absolutely insane, until one day, an angry manager burst into our studio and called everyone in there f-ing elephants. We took out a restraining order against the manager, and as we’d signed our lease before them, they moved out shortly afterwards. I think the second floor then remained empty for the duration of our tenancy.

Below: The Hayman Building in 2004 (when it was known as the Sofrana Building) and 2024, after a refurbishment led by Peddlethorp Architects that created continuous floor plates with the neighbouring Kronfeld Building, and recreated the building's original pediment. Photo at right by Samuel Hartnett. 

JEREMY PRIDDY Leasing Director, Cooper and Company 

I was a bit terrified because we actually had zero tenants. I talked to a lot of potential tenants, but nobody was a believer because it was such a shitty area. At that time Queen Street and High Street were strong, as was the Atrium on Elliott, which had just opened. On the other side of us, Quay Park was developing apartments and cool terrace houses and stuff. Nobody needed Britomart. People would frown at me, saying, “What on earth would we move down there for?” But we got Santos to open a café at 130 Quay Street, below our offices. And Mac’s Brew Bar opened in the Northern Steamship Building. And people liked them, so things started to happen. 

SARAH HULL Marketing Director, Cooper and Company 

We were looking at the fact that there was no lighting down here, there was no security. So we put in a whole lot of big stadium-style lighting and got the first security contract underway. Then we got the parking space in the middle sealed because it had just been gravel and big puddles of mud after they’d finished work on the train station underneath. We also got people to come here with events: we had big crowds for things like the Red Bull City Scramble (below), a huge dirt bike spectacular, and the inaugural Laneway Festival with Florence and the Machine. That made people think Britomart might actually be a place worth spending time in. 

CHRISTINE FLETCHER Auckland Mayor, 1998-2001

If you’re serious about getting people out of cars, you’ve got to make a safe environment. Urban design is a huge part of that, including lighting. It’s all stuff we now take for granted, but it was seen as pretty radical then.

PETER COOPER Executive Chairman, Cooper and Company 

What I envisaged was that women could always feel safe: no matter what time of night or day they finished work, they could walk around or go to the car park without threat or intimidation. It sounds simple, but there are a lot of things that need to be created and fall into place to achieve that, including lighting and security and a general sense of place. The gathering and sense of community is a key aspect to this.

ROBIN BYRON Senior Conservation Architect, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga

I like some of the guerrilla urbanism movements of Cooper and Company, like when they just put in the grass and the bean bags. They became frustrated, I think, trying to get some permissions from Auckland Council and just went ahead and did it. They just said, “Listen, let us do this and we will pay for it. We just want to get it done in the interest of the precinct and our tenants and the general and public environment.” And people loved it. I think that’s terrific.

LUCIEN LAW Founder, Savor Group; Former CEO, Shine Advertising

The first Shine office at Britomart was in the Stanbeth Building. I got a fancy car park right out front where the Showcases are now. I’d been in London for about six years, and coming back from there, Britomart just seemed so international compared to everywhere else. The vision was pretty cool and the loft spaces were pretty unique at the time. I was desperate to walk out of my small 10-person agency and see people walking around and getting coffee and have some sort of hustle and bustle. That felt interesting.

Below left: The Red Bull City Scramble, a motocross event held in the centre of Britomart in 2009, when it was mostly a gravel carpark. Below right: Takutai Square in 2024, photographed by Petra Leary. 

NEXT: Things get interesting (difficult) during the GFC, plus a new era of Britomart retail and restaurants emerges