02.02.2014Napier – Art Deco Town

We left Wellington on a cloudy day and drove north towards the east coast of the North Island.

Our destination for the day was the town of Napier, which is famous for its unique concentration of Art Deco buildings. After several hours in the car, a walk along the cloudy coast was just what we needed. The weather hadn’t changed much and the wind was whirling up the waves of the already rough sea:

We continued on to the famous Art Deco city center. After the crown bought the land from the Māori in 1851 it was decided to construct a planned city in 1854 and name it after Charles Napier, the British general and colonial administrator. In February of 1931 the city was leveled to the ground by a catastrophic earthquake. Fatalities in Napier and nearby Hastings counted 258 and Napier suddenly found itself 40 m² kilometers larger, as the earthquake heaved sections of a lagoon 2 meter above sea level. After that natural disaster the city was rebuilt in the popular style of the time and one of the worlds most uniform Art Deco cities was constructed.

The Daily Telegraph building is one of the perfect representatives of the Art Deco style:

The city center was almost unpeopled on late Saturday afternoon:

So we restrained ourselves to window shopping and posed with the statues in the pedestrian area:

In the evening it started raining and we managed to return to our hostel without getting too wet. We cooked some vegetables with couscous and enjoyed a Chardonnay from Hawke’s Bay which is right around the corner of Napier:

After this very short stop-over we left Napier the next morning and headed back inland towards Lake Taupo.