Wellington City Archives

Wellington City Archivist Michelle Redward and Archives Assistant Adrian Humphris in 1995, shortly after the Archives opened – initially there were just two staff.

Wellington was the first site of local government in New Zealand, and the city's archives date back to 1842 when the Wellington Borough Council was established.[3] As recently as 1994, council records were stored at more than 10 places around Wellington, loosely classified using a system devised in 1926. Many were housed in sub-standard conditions, at risk from temperature extremes and leaks, in breach of the Local Government Act requirements for the preservation of government archives.[4] Some were stored below sea level in the Town Hall basement, and periodically soaked in seawater.[5] The "rotting" documents were at risk of being lost forever, so the City Council approved relocating them to a central facility at a cost of $300,000.[6]

The Wellington City Archives were formally established in 1994, and Michelle Redward was appointed in March as Council archivist to supervise the move.[7] The new Wellington City Archives was opened by Mayor Mark Blumsky on 26 June 1996, in an environmentally-controlled and earthquake-proof facility off Tory Street, with 5 km of shelving over 730 square metres of storage area.[5][8] The Archives were expanded in 2005 to 1000 square metres, creating a work room and meeting room.[9][1] In 2007, more than 370,000 collection items and 9,000 scanned images were made available online, including large numbers of digitised building permit and consent records.[10]

In 2016 the Archives partnered with information management company Techtonics to develop a new information repository, a project that won the 2017 ALGIM Information and Records Management Project of the Year award.[2] Wellington City Archives is partnering with startup Excio to make more photographs from the collection available directly to people's mobile devices.[11]

The 1842 letter from Chauncey Townsend to James Marsh, Wellington City Archives' oldest correspondence. It is written in two directions to make the best use of scarce paper.

Wellington City Archives, one of the largest territorial archives in New Zealand,[12] contains 1.4 million documents, including over 20,000 photographs, which would stretch 10 km if laid back-to-back.[3][12] The archive's collections include:

• A parchment electoral roll dating for the first council in 1842, listing all men eligible to vote[5]
• An 1842 letter from settler Chauncey Henry Townsend, the Archives' earliest correspondence[13][14]
• A number of early sketches by Charles Decimus Barraud
• Drainage and storm water plans recording the former location of streams
• Minutes of the town board and City Council starting in 1863[8]
• Transcribed rate books containing land ownership records beginning in 1863[15]
• Correspondence from Richard Seddon and Julius Vogel[5]
• The Wellington Harbour Board archives, from its founding in 1880[16]
• The hand-drawn maps of Thomas Ward, who spent three years in the 1880s walking around Wellington sketching street plans[17]
• Building permits from 1892 and all completed contemporary resource and building consents (only live consents are held at the City Council offices)[3][8]
• The records of the Union Steam Ship Company from 1900[16]
• Panoramic photos of 1920s Wellington by photographer Robert Percy Moore[18]
• Photos from the official Council Photographer from the 1950s onward[1]

• 
  A register of drawings from the Wellington Harbour Board, 1920s
• 
  Rolls in storage, mostly building plans
• 
  Ejector station diagram, Drainage Plan D 358
• 
  Drainage plan
• 
  Illuminated memento of the 150th anniversary of the arrival of settlers at Port Nicholson
• 
  "London" archive boxes

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Wellington City Archives.

• Wellington City Archives website