The jewel of the Horowhenua, a fertile band between the Tararua Ranges and the coast, was a string of shallow lakes that served as an abundant food source. The area around Lake Horowhenua was inhabited by Muaūpoko iwi, although their occupation was disrupted during the Musket Wars by a bloody conflict with Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāti Toa led by Te Rauparaha, who would establish a base further down the coast. The advent of the rail line in the 1880s — the town is named after William Levin, a director of the Wellington and Manawatū Railway Company — was critical to local development. Like much of the country, the town was literally carved from the forest; the first key business was sawmilling and the second the tilling of the fertile soil that lay under the trees. As the land was cleared, the town developed as a service centre for agriculture and, later, horticulture in the surrounding area.

The post-war period saw a boom in light manufacturing, particularly textile-related industries, which, in turn, collapsed in the economic deregulation of the 1980s. Other later governmental moves, such as the closure of Kimberley Hospital and the Horticultural Research Station, would further dent the local economy. Despite these ups and downs, what remained on a steady downward arc was the lake, subject to abuses from which it is only now being allowed to recover.

Perhaps surprisingly, a thousand-page global survey book called Contemporary Architects, published in 1987, included two buildings in Levin. But Levin is a reminder of the fragility of architectural achievement. Even at the peak of its economic vitality, the advent of a noteworthy piece of public architecture has occurred in Levin only once or twice a decade. This relative scarcity is exacerbated by a driving but hit-and-miss force in small-town life: the desire for ‘progress’. Many of the most noteworthy buildings produced across Levin’s history have since been demolished: the Carnegie library, a John Campbell-designed post office, churches, a modern hospital and several generations of municipal offices by leading big-city firms.

Kiwis might see Levin as emblematic of small-town life but it’s not that small — it is currently 31st on the list of the nation’s biggest urban areas. That said, there aren’t — or aren’t now — any
nationally significant buildings in town. It is, though, knitted into our architectural history with buildings by and connections to important firms. It also demonstrates in microcosm a key change that has taken place across the last half century. The local institutions — particularly churches, but also power boards, community hall committees and clubs — that historically commissioned architects to populate our towns with noteworthy public buildings have largely lost the capacity to do so. Even quasi-local institutions like banks and post offices have lost the inclination to build. Except in the case of a few resort towns, architecture seems to
be withdrawing from small towns. Towns are losing the demographic or economic punch for community-level development, and struggle to attract governmental or corporate entities with the wherewithal for building projects of any ambition.

Declaring deficits in our national architecture has long been a favourite of commentators, from Samuel Hurst Seager’s 1900 complaint that our architectural art had seen “no true development” to The Group’s Bill Wilson’s post-war declaration that “There is no architecture in New Zealand.” Over the space of a generation, Levin has seen more important buildings demolished than built but we need not declare time of death. The quiescence of Levin and communities like it should, though, alert architects to the way that their energies are being diverted from supporting communities. Architectural gems must remain one of the charms of small-town life.

THE ITINERARY

 1. 1905 – Bank of Australasia

28 Queen Street
Crichton & McKay

Crichton & McKay was amongst the most active and successful Wellington firms of its time, training a number of significant architects, and starting a lineage of practices that continued under various names until very recently — successor firm Bulleyment Fortune Architects completed the Police Station next door on Salisbury Street in 1994. The firm produced houses and commercial buildings all around the lower North Island, including branches for a number of different banks, often producing more than one bank in a town. They also worked, for example, on the Bank of New Zealand building still standing directly across Queen Street.

2. 1922 – Thompson House

4 Kent Street
Clere & Williams

In a long and prolific career, Frederick de Jersey Clere was active across the lower North Island. He is best known for his churches — his 1897 wooden structure for St Mary’s in Levin was built just a stone’s throw from Thompson House — but he produced commercial and civic buildings, as well as houses. This house, built for local doctor James Thompson and now Heritage New Zealand listed, was purchased by the Levin Borough Council in 1973 to become a cultural and arts centre for use by the community. Clere’s St Mary’s, which had been superseded by a Prouse and Wilson building, was demolished in 1977.

3. 1936 – St John’s Methodist Church

90 Cambridge Street
Prouse & Wilson

William Prouse was a key figure in the Wellington architecture scene, practising for a time as Hoggard & Prouse as well as having a stint practising with William Gummer before the formation of Gummer and Ford. Prouse came from a family of timber merchants. His uncles were key figures in the establishment of Levin, setting up a timber mill that was a key engine in the area’s economic development and building the town’s first Methodist church. That wooden structure was replaced by this brick and stucco building. Fun fact: in 1972, the church’s stained-glass window featured on the five-cent Christmas stamp.

4. 1940 – Horowhenua College Main Building

65–73 Weraroa Road
Bertie Kelly

Kelly was a prolific Wellington-based architect who, as architect to the Wellington Education Board, designed numerous schools and the heritage-listed former Education Board Building (1940) at 65 Abel Smith Street, Wellington. Kelly’s firm was joined in the late-1940s by John Lindsay Mair (son of Government Architect John Thomas Mair) but, after the death of his wife in the 1950s, Kelly joined the Marist Brothers in Karori — just in time to play a key role in commissioning John Scott to design the Futuna Chapel (1958). Heritage New Zealand Category 2-listed, the building is well preserved; the unfortunate fence along the street is new.

5. 1956 – St Joseph’s Catholic Church

56 Weraroa Road
James T. Craig & Associates

Like many Catholic churches, this complex includes a convent and a Catholic primary school. From 1843, this parish was attached to the Māori mission in Ōtaki; a side chapel in the church featuring tukutuku panels and carvings is testament to the congregation’s Māori roots. The church, the tower of which was recently demolished because of seismic concerns, was designed by Lower Hutt-based James T. Craig. He is best known for projects contributing to the 1950s’ expansion of Lower Hutt, and for the Clock Tower in The Square in Palmerston North; his firm would eventually become Craig Moller.

6. 1959 –Home for War Veterans

Prouse Street
Dudley Roy, Architect

Roy had a peripatetic career, working as in-house architect for the State Advances Corporation, serving as a field engineer in the Pacific and Europe during World War II, leading his own firm and, eventually, operating in partnership with Ian Tulloch, designing conservative homes in various styles around the Wellington region. Described on its opening as “ultra-modern”, the Home was designed to house 104 veterans in a combination of hospital ward and individual bedrooms; it anticipates contemporary rest homes. The building is still in relatively original condition: particularly the dining room with its dramatic folded octagonal roof. See Architecture NZ July 1963.

7. 1965 – Levin Public Library

10 Bath Street
David Taylor, Architect

In 1911, Levin was recipient of one of the 18 New Zealand libraries funded by American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Standing on a prominent street corner, it featured a flamboyant neoclassical design by prolific Wellington-based architect James Bennie. That was demolished and replaced in the 1960s by Taylor’s crisp modernist number a few steps down Bath Steet. (Palmerston North-based Taylor is best known as architect of the 1977 Manawatū Art Gallery.) In 2012, this library was, in turn, absorbed into Te Takeretanga o Kura-hau-pō, an NZIA Award-winning community centre by Designgroup Stapleton Elliott that converted the library and an adjacent vacant supermarket.

8. 1972 – Queen Street Gospel Chapel

541 Queen Street
Rossano Fan

Sharp-eyed readers may have noted Michelle Wang’s recent article about Rossano (Ming Ching) Fan (Architecture NZ Nov/Dec 2024), who emigrated from Hong Kong to Levin in the early 1960s after marrying into a local market gardening family. He spent some time working for Palmerston North architect David Taylor (see listing 7), and even a few months in the New York office of modernist maestro Marcel Breuer. His own work, mostly houses between Wellington and the Horowhenua, caught the attention of figures such as Sir Ian Athfield and Roger Walker but not, at the time at least, of our architectural media.

9. 1973 – Waiopehu College

74 Batholomew Road
Ministry of Works

This is a well-built and largely intact example of the standard s68 high school: a pattern used in more than 50 new college campuses around the country in the 1970s. The design language was crisp: single-storey classrooms in brick or concrete block, connected with courtyards and long corridors that flipped between inside and outside along their lengths. Structure was expressed, and pop-up clerestories provided excellent natural light and ventilation in the classrooms, but the complex, low-pitched roofs and internal gutters tended to cause ongoing problems. McKenzie Higham Architects’ NZIA Award-winning Horowhenua Teen Parent Unit (2015) is on the campus.

10. 1983 – New Regent Theatre

14-16 Salisbury Street
Warren and Mahoney

Levin’s long-standing cinema was the charming Regent Theatre on Oxford Street, completed in 1926 by James Bennie. Seismically inadequate, it was demolished in 1984 (making room for Manz:Smith’s Regent Court — see listing 12) and replaced by this single-screen theatre. The building is part of a series of Warren and Mahoney projects defined by big roofs and prismatic geometry that, despite many being of significant size and some winning awards, are largely absent from the firm’s canon, perhaps in favour of the PoMo that followed. Now called Focal Point, the complex was expanded to three screens by Dennis Manz in 1996.

11. 1983 – Levin Post Office

518 Queen Street East
Ministry of Works and Development

This prominent corner was marked by a 1903 post office by John Campbell (later given the title Government Architect), designed in the distinctive style his office employed in small towns all around the country. Campbell’s landmark was demolished in the 1980s and the postal functions have since been withdrawn, but the replacement building has nonetheless become a symbol of the town. This role was reinforced when it served as the immediately recognisable backdrop in videos of the “Levin Car Invasion” of 2024, when 500 boy racers engaged in “anti-social road user activity”.

12. 1989 – MacDonnell Chapel
685 Queen Street East
Manz:Smith Architects

This chapel is part of the Horowhenua Masonic Village, designed by Wellington firm Structon Group and officially opened in 1978. The chapel resulted from a donation by a resident, the commission going to a local firm. Dennis Manz spent several years practising in the area, one of the few registered architects ever to be based in Levin. Other notable works include the Levin Gas Company offices at 83 Oxford Street (ca. 1980) and the Council-commissioned Regent Court mixed-use complex at 173 Oxford Street (1985), and, in the late 1980s, he provided the author with a summer job.

13. 2007 – Horowhenua District Council Building

126-148 Oxford Street
Designgroup Elliott Architects

Wellington innovators Gabites, Alington & Edmondson made proposals for a civic centre but realised only an annex to the Horowhenua County Council office (1976). This was demolished in 2007 to make way for a supermarket car park. This new building makes clever use of one of Levin’s few non-flat sites and is organised around a dramatic double-height foyer but, like that supermarket car park nearby, sets aside a defining imperative of main street architecture in small towns — build up to the lot line. Integrated art animates the structure and tells the story of key moments in local history.

14. 2010 – Levin District Courthouse

9 Bristol Street
Tse Architects

This building replaced a courthouse built in 1903 (opened the same day as the old Post Office and, likely, also designed by John Campbell), which has now been moved to the Rose Gardens on Cambridge Street. It won an NZIA Western Architecture Award in 2010 and the jury wrote of the building: “This contemporary take on a courthouse shows a good use of materials and colours throughout… The scale and proportion of the building complements both its function and the immediate environment. An excellent balance was achieved between functionality and security on this complex Ministry of Justice project.”

OTHER ADDRESSES

1902; 1927 – Former Bank of New Zealand
27 Queen Street East
L.G. West & Son; Crichton McKay & Haughton

1909 – Railway Station
34 Oxford Street
NZ Railway Architectural Department under Sir George Troup

1956 – Levin & District War Memorial Hall
1A Chamberlain Street
Gray Young, Morton and Young

1963 – St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church
87 Oxford Street
Prouse & Wilson c.

1967 – Steelweb Upholstery
30 Coventry Street
Adams & Dodd

1969 – Levin Mall
191 Oxford Street
Lewis Walker, Glossop and Co

1970 – Barraud & Abraham Warehouse
1 Mako Mako Road
J. Rex Roberts & Partners

1970 – Levin Dyeworks
15 Tiro Tiro Road
Adams & Dodd

1990 – Levin Aquatic Centre
Cnr Queen and Salisbury Streets
Burwell Hunt Architects

SOURCES

Levin doesn’t much figure in our published architectural histories. Raupo to Deco: Wellington Styles and Architects 1840–1940 (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2014) by Geoff Mew and Adrian Humphris is full of background on the Wellingtonbased firms, including Crichton & McKay, Bertie Kelly and Frederick de Jersey Clere. Clere fans might seek out Susan Mclean’s Architect of the Angels: The Churches of Frederick de Jersey Clere (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 2003), and Warren and Mahoney fans should look for John Balasoglou’s New Territory: Warren and Mahoney (Auckland: Balasoglou Books, 2005). The Samuel Hurst Seagar quote is from ‘Architectural Art in Zealand’ from the Journal of the RIBA, 29 September 1900: 481–491. The Bill Wilson quote is from ‘The Small House’, Kiwi: The Annual Magazine of the Students’ Association of the Auckland University College, 43 (November 1948): 27–33. Both texts are accessible in Douglas Lloyd Jenkins’ New Dreamland: Writing New Zealand Architecture (Auckland: Godwit, 2005). The global survey mentioned is Ann Lee Morgan’s Contemporary Architects (Chicago: St James Press, 1987). Anthony Dreaver’s Levin: The Making of a Town (Levin: Horowhenua District Council, 2006) is an in-depth local history which touches on architecture at various points.

The Itinerary series is supported by Dulux Colours of New Zealand. Dulux Colour Specialist Davina Harper has selected a Colours of New Zealand palette based on this itinerary. See the full range and order colour samples here.