Kete New Plymouth

Kowhai Street is located in Strandon, one of the original streets in an early subdivision known as Chilman’s Estate.

The ambitious development comprising 46 sections was surveyed and advertised for sale in 1899. The auction was organised by Newton King Ltd. on behalf of the beneficiaries of the estate of the landowner, the late Richard Chilman.

The sales pitch promised that this was “without exception the finest piece of land for building sites near New Plymouth and has the advantages of the Fitzroy Bus passing hourly”. Nine

Fyson Place is a short cul-de-sac on the right as you head south out of Hāwera, just past the McDonalds store. 

Albert Kemball (Kem) Fyson was born in Gisborne in 1893, the son of a local postman. Kem was working as a bank clerk when the First World War broke out and served with the New Zealand Engineers. He fought at Gallipoli and was badly wounded the following year while fighting in France. In June 1916 Fyson suffered severe wounds to his right arm and

‘Go west young man’ was a common refrain in America in the 1860s. In Taranaki in the later 1800s, a young man might have been urged to ‘go east’. The main road out of Stratford, heading east, is named after the direction it takes the traveller.

East Road was first planned in 1882 when a survey party laid out the line of a road through to Ongarue. A bridge was built over the Kahouri Stream in 1885 and by 1889 the dirt road was cut through to

For well over a century the residents of Cloten Road were unaware that their street name was spelt incorrectly. In 1996 former mayor Leo Carrington alerted the Stratford District Council to the mistake.

Cloton Road (as it was first known) appears on early maps of the Stratford settlement. On 31 August 1878 sections in the new township where put up for auction and it was reported that the first section sold was number 43, on the corner of Cordelia Street and Cloton Road.

From this date onward

Brassey Street in Waverley was named after career soldier Major Willoughby Brassey.

Born in London in 1817, the son of the High Sherriff of Essex, Willoughby Brassey served in the Royal Navy until 1839 before joining the East India Company, taking part in military action in various locations including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen and Iran. In the late 1850s he immigrated to New Zealand where he married Elizabeth Munhal in 1861 and had five children. She died in 1870 and he later married Frances Slattery, with whom he had four