Kete New Plymouth

Bowen Crescent is an Ōpunake curiosity. It’s in two separate parts. Neither is shaped like a crescent. How did this come to be so?

Much of the land immediately above Middleton Bay is Crown grant land. This land wasn’t developed for housing to the same extent as the privately-owned land that surrounds it. With relatively few houses built, Bowen Crescent remained an unformed roadway, never required to be completed as intended. Today both parts of Bowen Crescent connect to other streets.

Some historians have suggested there’s uncertainty

In the 19^th century several land surveyors were busy mapping the Taranaki region. Many of them are remembered in the names of the roads they plotted. Stuart Newall is one. However, surveying was only one of several activities he undertook when he decided to live in New Zealand.

He was born in Scotland in 1843. In his twenties he headed for Otago, to mine for gold. That he worked the rest of his life indicates he had about as much success as many of his contemporaries.

He joined the Armed Constabulary, serving in several locations around New Zealand and being

Of all the many streets in Stratford named after Shakespearean characters, only one is named for the bard himself.

The town’s connection to William Shakespeare (1564-1616) began from the earliest days of settlement in the 1870s. Suggested names for the new municipality originally included Kellyville, Carrington, Standish and Sylvania. But the Pātea River was said to look so much like England’s River Avon that the name Stratford-on-Pātea, in homage to Shakespeare’s birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon, was officially adopted on 3 December 1877. The latter part of the title eventually fell out of use and the

Queen Street in Waitara was named after Queen Victoria, the reigning monarch at the time the town was founded.

There are more than sixty other Queen Streets around New Zealand but this one is unusual in having two parts, separated by the site of what was once the Waitara freezing works. Queen Street runs along the western bank of the Waitara River and used to be the main thoroughfare of the town, home to its first hotel, bank and a post office which stood where the

Mould Street in Waitara was named after the Commander of the Royal Engineers during the Taranaki Wars.

Thomas Rawlings Mould was born in 1805 and educated at the Royal Military Academy (known as “The Shop”) in London. He joined the Royal Engineers in 1826 and by 1855 had worked his way up to Lieutenant Colonel. He was sent to New Zealand in December of that year as Inspector of Public Works in the colony, advising the government on everything from defence to boundary disputes to canals.

Mould