Shirley, New Zealand

Shirley
Shirley
Coordinates: 43°30′14″S 172°39′39″E / 43.503963°S 172.660879°E / -43.503963; 172.660879Coordinates: 43°30′14″S 172°39′39″E / 43.503963°S 172.660879°E / -43.503963; 172.660879
Area
• Total	3.1454 km2 (1.2144 sq mi)
Population (2006)
• Total	7,176
• Density	2,300/km2 (5,900/sq mi)

Shirley, sometimes referred to as Windsor, is a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) north-east of the city centre. The area was used since the 1850s for farming and subdivision started in the early 20th century, with most of the houses built between 1950 and 1980.

History

The suburb spreads across wholly flat land which before the arrival of the first European colonists in the 1850s consisted of streams running into marshland between weathered and grassy sand dunes. Sheep and dairy cattle began to be grazed on the land within a few years of their arrival, the area being part of the Sandhills station. Land began to be bought by families of small farmers from 1863 onwards, and during the rest of the 19th century the future suburb was a district of market gardens, dairy farms and small grazing farms divided by hedgerows. A farmhouse and stables could be found along the roads every few hundred metres. As more and more land was drained it was often highly productive. One large estate was also established in the district, owned by the very wealthy Rhodes family who chose not to live on the land but instead lived mostly in a very large mansion in Merivale. Their estate in the district was run by managers and overseers. The settlers of the district were mostly English and Scottish, but some Irish families also settled, and in the 1870s a significant group of Poles from eastern Germany. A small village of shops and one or two churches by that time had began to grow up along what would later become known as Shirley Road.

Most of the housing in Shirley was built between 1950 and 1980. A large block of state housing, known as the Emmett Block, developed on the western side of the suburb during the immediate postwar years. On the eastern side the housing was built mostly by private developers, among others Paramount Homes. The standard house built by developers was a one-storey bungalow of three or four bedrooms under a low roof in streets that sometimes followed the course of old streams, meandered in various artificial crescents, or else ended in culs-de-sac. The socio-economic level of the suburb as a whole has always been very near the average for the suburbs of Christchurch. The poorest streets are in the Emmett Block. The most expensive streets tend to be towards the north of the suburb or in a cluster near Dudley Stream.

Etymology

The suburb was given its name by a property developing family. Susannah Buxton (née Shirley) was married to John Buxton (1806–1886).^[1] On her deathbed in 1868, she asked her son, Joseph Shirley Buxton (1833–1898), to gift land to the Methodists to build a church. Her wish was carried out and the Shirley Methodist Church was named after her. The suburb eventually became known as Shirley after the church.^[2]

Subdivision started in the early 20th century, at which time the area was known as North Richmond.^[2] The name then changed to Windsor, until it was discussed at a meeting at the Windsor Wesleyan School that land agents indicated land sold better if the locality was called Shirley instead of Windsor. Windsor thus went out of fashion as the name of the suburb, but it lives on in names like Windsor Golf Club, Windsor Service Station, Windsor House and Windsor School.^[3]

Description and services

The Shirley Community Centre displaying significant earthquake damage

The suburb now includes one of the largest shopping malls in Christchurch, called The Palms Shopping Centre, together with the Shirley Golf Course and Bunnings Homebase. Shirley Boys' High School opened in September 1957.^[4] The former primary school was converted to a community centre. The building is listed as a Category II heritage structure with the New Zealand Historic Places Trust and was badly damaged in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.^[5] It has since been demolished.^[6]

Notable residents

The most notable person to grow up in the suburb during the postwar years was the novelist and historian Stevan Eldred-Grigg. He lived in Olivine Street from 1959 to 1974 and two of his novels provide vivid portraits of Shirley as it was during those years. The Shining City^[7] calls Olivine Street 'Agate Street' and Shirley 'Longwood'. The novel opens with this passage: "Longwood was nifty. Longwood was what a suburb was supposed to be, it was what the whole world was supposed to be. When I looked through the windscreen as we drove from somewhere to somewhere, I saw the glass of the picture windows of Longwood gleam back at me through the glass of the moving car. I saw a new world. A world of pastel pinks and sky blues, full-gloss greens and yellows." Mum^[8] portrays the suburb more darkly as 'Aranoni'. "Aranoni was this bargain basement suburb where everyone was being driven mad by mortgages on shitty little three-bedroom subdivision quickies that they found themselves stuffed into by the building companies and the banks in the business of ripping them off. ... Aranoni was a sort of minimum security prison for debtors, with tidy lawns and paling fences and espaliered grape vines instead of barbed wire."

References