Alexander Turnbull Library Timeframes collection 1/2-001640-G. Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.
My house was built in 1974, in one of the last big gasps of subdivision at the Titirangi end of the valley. This process increasingly intensified in the area after World War II, and indeed continues to this day, although in a more managed way.
In Auckland City Libraries excellent Heritage Collection of photos I found a panoramic series taken by James D. Richardson in 1920, from Henry Atkinson's house at the top of the hill above my house.
Although you can see right across Auckland, it is the foreground that is the most interesting. The future suburbia of Green Bay is farmland with pockets of bush, including the slightly younger kahikatea.
In another photo taken by the same photographer fourteen years later from a similar vantage point, signs of change are already apparent, such as better roads to accommodate the motorcar.
Classics professor and popular writer E. M. Blaiklock (Grammaticus) lived in one of these farms as a young boy between about 1910-20. Inside the front cover of one of his collections of autobiographical writing is a fascinating map of the farm between Golf and Godley Roads, from the corner of Green Bay School, down towards where the Green Bay shops are today. In his books he writes extensively about his boyhood wonderland, with much rich description of the area before suburbia took over.
Lena Godley bought the Pinesong property across the valley in December 1907. The Godley's worked hard to build a house and develop the property, but the dream ended when Captain Godley tragically hung himself in the house. In 1911 the property was then divided into north and south sections through forming Avonleigh Road and back on the market, to be bought by New Lynn brickmakers Charles and Ryce Gardner, who owned it for the next thirty years.
