150-Year-Old Secret Unearthed
Colonial Auckland has revealed one of its long-buried secrets after construction teams discovered fragments from an old wooden fire bell tower at the Aotea Station site.
Some of the tower’s concrete foundations and timber footings were uncovered in Albert Street near the intersection with Victoria Street. The foundations supported a 23-metre-high tower built in the 1880s (back in Queen Victoria’s time) and was used as a fire lookout.
CRL Ltd Chief Executive, Sean Sweeney, described the discovery as a “archaeological snapshot of the past and a reminder of what it was like to be in Auckland without all the mod cons we take for granted today.”
Watchmen had to huff and puff their way up five sets of steep stairs to reach the tower’s lookout above a town built mainly of wood and brick and vulnerable to fire.
The tower was topped by a heavy bell known as “Big Ben”. There was no electricity at the time and watchmen had to use hydraulics to ring “Big Ben” and raise the alarm. It could be heard 11 kilometres away - providing it was a still day with no wind. The number of the bell’s gongs indicated the location of a fire.
“Big Ben” and the tower were decommissioned in 1902 when the city’s main fire station moved opposite to its present site in Pitt Street.
Matt Sinclair, Link Alliance Site Manager at Aotea Station said the tower’s kauri wood was “in pretty good nick” considering it had been underground almost 150 years and some of the segments still locked together in a set.
Taken at the Auckland Fire Station after CRL’s contractors Link Alliance donated the tower segments to the Auckland Fire Brigades Museum & Historical Society – from left: Dave Neil (Auckland Fire Brigades Museum & Historical Society), Jason Haggerty (Link Alliance), Matt Cheyne (Link Alliance), Matt Sinclair (Link Alliance), Vaughan Mackereth (Fire & Emergency NZ), Hunter White (Link Alliance), Murray Binning (Auckland Fire Brigades Museum & Historical Society)
The tower fragments will be preserved in a new location that appropriately fits their fire-fighting past. The Aotea Station team has donated them to the Auckland Fire Brigade’s Museum & Historical Society.
“It’s a real treat to have such an amazing piece of our history back – something that we have only ever seen photos of before,” said Colin Prince, Secretary and Archivist for the Museum.
The fire tower foundations are the latest in a growing list of artefacts from Auckland’s past uncovered by the construction work for CRL. Discoveries include an old well, bricks used for buildings and drains, an old boiler, part of a seawall, wharf piles, bottles, the remains of a scrubbing brush, and fragments of two trees buried for almost 30,000 years. A colonial kauri cottage was also removed from the Mt Eden site and shifted by truck to a new location in Waikato.