Along with the harbour, Te Papa and the hills, Parliament Buildings are one of Wellington's best-known landmarks. Standing at the north-west corner of the central business district, the parliamentary complex dominates this part of New Zealand's capital city.
Auckland was a bustling place in 1854 when Parliament met there for the first time. The buildings were located in paddocks on what was then the edge of town, Constitution Hill, between Official Bay and Mechanics Bay, close to the present-day University of Auckland.
In 1907 fire destroyed all the buildings at Parliament, except for the library. Deciding what to do next was a difficult task, made harder by the fact that the House had to go about its business in the cramped old Government House, located across Sydney Street.
John Campbell of the Public Works Department prepared proposals for the rebuilding of Parliament for either side of Sydney Street. A joint select committee of the House and Legislative Council in 1908 considered the proposals and recommended that the surviving library building be remodelled and greatly extended to provide for departmental offices that would replace the wooden departmental building on Lambton Quay. The committee suggested the demolition of the departmental building – regarded as a fire risk and too small to house Wellington's burgeoning army of civil servants – to make its valuable site available for commercial use; an arcade of shops and offices had been proposed for the site. Fortunately, the wooden building survived, and since the 1990s it has been used as the Law Faculty of Victoria University of Wellington.
The new Parliament House of the early 20th century was dogged by problems of cost, design and supply of materials and labour. Around 1917 the top floor had been added and the grounds had been levelled, but everything was behind schedule.
Members of Parliament (MPs) were so desperate to get out of the run-down old Government House that Parliament moved into the incomplete buildings in 1918. Construction continued around them until work petered out in 1922, leaving the southern wall incomplete. Parliament House had to wait until 1995 for an official opening, when Queen Elizabeth II did the honours.
New Zealanders have called many structures home. Some have been solid and permanent: kauri villas set in lawns and gardens, row houses on cramped Dunedin sections, sprawling state house communities in Otara. Many homes were wrought from the bush, especially in the early part of the century when raupo whare, canvas huts and roughly-hewn timber cottages dotted the landscape in remote or rural areas. For some, home was a room in an institution, a boarding house or an old people's home. Later in the century, retirement villages or rest homes catered for New Zealand's growing elderly population. Temporary shelter has also housed large numbers of New Zealanders at different times: tents in wartime, huts on tramping tracks, caravans in camping grounds, motels and hotels, transit camps, night shelters, time-share apartments.
Milk bars were often fitted into the ground floor of long, narrow Victorian or Edwardian buildings. Individual booths began to appear, giving greater privacy for patrons. The bar generally stretched almost the entire length of the establishment, replicating the classic American public bar made familiar through exposure to Hollywood films.
