Every day, hundreds of thousands of Aucklanders crossing
the harbour bridge see one of the city's true waterfront landmarks, and yet very
few know its fascinating history and heritage values.
The
familiar pink Chelsea Sugar Refinery as seen from the Waitemata Harbour. Photo:
Bryan Goddard
No matter how many smart,
shiny modern machines are inside it, there’s no ignoring the past as you walk
through the Chelsea Sugar Refinery in Birkenhead on Auckland’s North Shore.
It’s a huge, unglamorous industrial site crouched beside the sea, surrounded
by bush and house-clad hills, painted top-to-toe in an improbable, unflattering
but definitive “Chelsea” pink. Its labyrinth of buildings is a jarring
mix of architectures that reflects the refinery’s 122-year history and its
very practical industrial purpose, with few nods to aesthetics. Dominating all
is the iconic, hulking Char House (as seen on the company logo) whose 37-metrehigh, metre-plus-thick
brick walls tower over all.
Two things are instantly striking: this is
a living, breathing piece of Victoriana – the old buildings positively
ooze character, and it’s not much of a stretch to imagine the place crawling
with Dickensian, char-covered workers and belching black smoke over the surrounding landscape
– and this stunning, green, pohutukawa-lined coastal site must be one
of the country’s most beautiful industrial settings.
It wasn’t
good looks that first drew the Colonial Sugar Refining Company to the site
in 1882, when the chairman bought around 65 hectares of mostly bare farmland
to establish New Zealand’s first (and still only) sugar refinery. It was
an isolated area: the Herald newspaper described it in 1883 as uninhabited
and “wild and bleak”. But the site had a deep-water access to the
Waitemata for a port, plenty of fresh water for the water-hungry refining process,
building materials – timber, clay – on site, and it was close, by boat,
to Auckland.
The
familiar pink Chelsea Sugar Refinery as seen from the Waitemata Harbour. Photo:
Rob Harvey
They didn’t waste time.
In 1883, 150 workers moved into a tent town on the land and began work, starting
with pickaxe levelling the site, filling in the lagoon, whipping up some 1.5 million
bricks (half a million for the two dams, a million for the buildings) from the
surrounding land, and buildings (first blasting the bedrock), for starters. Incredibly,
by 1884, the refinery began operating and basically hasn’t stopped, 24/7,
since.
Because of the area’s isolation, the refinery essentially had
to be self-sufficient, from workers’ veggie gardens through to tool and boat-building
operations and power generation. A Chelsea sugar worker might have been involved
in refining sugar, but was just as likely to be a carpenter, plumber, fitter,
cooper, tinsmith, blacksmith, sailor or sailmaker.
Around 100 of the original
workers stayed on and took jobs at the refinery, some of them moving in to the
brand spanking new company village nearby, complete with school, reading room
and privately owned shop (progressive company policy discouraged the old “I
owe my soul to the company store” routine). By 1905, the buildings were condemned
– some were moved and are still standing in Birkenhead – and, later,
the four brick homes that are still there were built near the site of the original
village.
The
refinery earned its own postcard in 1915. Photo: Tanner
Bros Ltd (publishers)
It’s impossIble
to overstate the impact the refinery had on what was rural wilderness Birkenhead
before its arrival. It was the main employer and attracted people and money to
the area. In 1886, Birkenhead township’s population was 334, while Chelsea
company village had 189. By 1900, the borough population was 1000, and one-third
of the men in Birkenhead were sugar workers. Casual work at the refinery helped
local orchards survive through lean times. Its sirens, starting at 5.30am, punctuated
daily life (“…and when the five o’clock whistle blew, the table
cloth went on,” said one worker’s wife), its waste blackened clean washing,
and the annual picnic was a hugely anticipated extravaganza that made Birkenhead
a ghost town for the day. Staff manned local boards, sports teams and bands, refinery
loans built the early homes and the works were responsible for the bulk of the
feverish shipping action (until the Auckland Harbour Bridge opened in 1959).
The
impact is less obvious today but the works still employ locals, the buildings
are a major part of the landscape, their steaming industrious pinkness an iconic
landmark from the Auckland side of the Waitemata. Chelsea-branded trucks thunder
out daily, and the refinery’s surrounding park area and ponds are a regular
destination for dog-walkers, joggers and duckfeeding families (local legend has
it that the ponds’ voracious, ferocious eels are responsible for snacking
on poor ducklings’ wee feet, which may explain why so many of Chelsea’s
ducks walk funny).
The
familiar pink Chelsea Sugar Refinery as seen from the Waitemata Harbour. Photo:
Chelsea
Archive, Birkenhead Public Library
Chelsea’s importance is also wider than the local community, says
Martin Jones, Heritage Advisor Registration for the New Zealand Historic Places
Trust. It is nationally and internationally significant as well. The refinery’s
early factory buildings, manager’s house and workers’ houses are registered
as Category II historic places. “But the whole area is an important industrial
landscape linked with the international sugar trade,” he says. “Sugar
was a very valuable commodity in New Zealand and internationally. By 1860, it
was New Zealand’s second most important import.”
It was a very
unusual complex for its time – its size alone made it a rarity –
and it represented enormous investment. It was not just the only place producing
sugar in the country, but one of few in the South Pacific. “The refinery
marks New Zealand’s coming-of-age as an economic force,” says Jones.
We were big enough and had enough economic clout to make it cheaper to refine
rather than import the finished goods.
Located a short distance from the
factory gates, the site of the original workers’ village is significant
and rare, and, says Jones, “reflects prevailing ideas on class”. For
example, skilled employees such as the engineer and sugar boilers had the best
houses in the settlement, while the manager’s house was completely separate,
next to the “clean” end of the production process.
Brick
making and construction, 1883. Photo: Chelsea Archive,
Birkenhead Public Library
Chelsea is one
of the few surviving 19th-century refineries in Australasia, and one of the longest-functioning industries
in New Zealand. Reflecting an architectural tradition that extends back to the
Industrial Revolution, it used (and still contains) equipment that was imported
from Greenock near Glasgow, one of the major centres of British sugar refining
at the time and where today there are no working refineries, adds Jones.
The
refinery is also very closely tied in to Auckland’s rich maritime history
– most workers walked to work, but everything else, from food to mail to
news, and especially coal from Australia and the West Coast and raw sugar from
Fiji, Cuba, Australia, Indonesia and Peru, arrived by sea. In the 1920s, more
than 120 Auckland wharfies ferried to Chelsea daily, unloading the sacks of raw
sugar and stacking them in the raw store.
Refinery work was often dirty
and dangerous labour. Even as recently as 1969, a disenchantedemployee, one James
K. Baxter, upon his dismissal as a cleaner after hree weeks, was moved to write
a poem. “The Ballad of the Stonegut Sugar Works” includes the lines,
“… along those slippery floors/A manmight break a leg/And the foul stink
of Diesel fumes/Flows through the packing shed/And men in clouds of char dust
move/Like the animated dead…”
Modern Chelsea is a much more …
ahem … refined workplace with modern, cleaner and safer methods of production.
The evolution of Chelsea work practices, industrial relations and technology (for
example, moving from coal-generated power, through to gas, then on to the national
grid) reflected national change. It’s easy to imagine the crusty, labour-hardened
old-timers having a good belly laugh at modern visitors in reflective vests, hardhats
and safety eyewear, protecting them from the perils of the quietly humming,
clean, efficient and largely mechanised refinery equipment used today. Chelsea,
therefore is a dynamic industrial workplace where the past is palpable –
in the buildings, the surrounding landscape and the memories of the locals. It’s
a living piece of history that has been preserved largely on the strength
of its economic worth. Its future may depend on the value we place on its past.
Future
tense
What of the future of the refinery? John Ellis, commercial manager
at Chelsea, says the company is looking for certainty by way of an application
to the North Shore City Council to change the district plan. Proposed Private
Plan Change No 16; the Chelsea Mixed Use Overlay Plan, is a request to the council
to amend its district plan to allow mixed use of some of Chelsea’s land
in the event of the refinery ceasing operation.
The idea is to sell 37
of their 52 hectares to the council to use as undeveloped open space for public
use in perpetuity. The remaining roughly 15 hectares will continue to operate
as it does today. But, if refining should end, the 15 hectares could be developed
for residential and light commercial activities. Developments could mean up to
528 homes including eight-storey apartments. Chelsea has no intention of ceasing
refining sugar. “It’s a good business,” says Ellis. “We want
to continue it. But, if we had to stop, we want to have some certainty on what
to do.”
The Historic Places Trust has made a submission (one of more
than 500 at time of writing, mostly against the proposal) to council to, “Decline
the proposed plan change, as currently proposed”.
Trust objections
to the plan change state that there is a lack of proper assessment of the impact
the proposed Chelsea Mixed Use Overlay would have on the heritage significance
of the Chelsea Sugar Refinery. The Trust fears that the plan change will result
in some of the significant values of the refinery being lost through the development
that would be required to facilitate the desired mixed use. Trust Heritage Advisor
Planning Megan Patrick points out that being registered as an historic place doesn’t
offer protection to heritage values, as such. Protection is achieved through such
tools as provisions within a district plan. That is why this plan change is
so important.
Ellis says the proposed plan change is widely misunderstood,
and that current regulations protect the registered heritage areas in question.
The sale to the council of the proposed public space is dependent on the approval
of the change to the district plan going through. “We don’t need to
sell. We were approached by the Chelsea Park Trust… $20 million for 37
hectares – why bother for all this grief ?” he asks.
He adds that
the company is proud of its history of protecting its heritage and surrounding
environment, and has no intention of jeopardising that heritage. “The only
reason these buildings are still standing and protected is because we are still
using them and have maintained them. We have spent a lot of money refurbishing
the workers’ cottages and the manager’s house, planting the land and
allowing public access, donating our archives to the library, recording our history
as we go along.”
The Trust says it wants to see an ongoing future for
the site, ideally with the continuation of the current refinery use. However,
if this use is to cease, there is a need to ensure future use is undertaken in
such a way as to protect the heritage significance of the site. Trust Heritage
Advisor Architecture Robin Byron adds that maintaining heritage values has a lot
to do with the identification of an adaptive re-use that is compatible with the
form, character and qualities of the existing buildings. The Trust recognises
that certain compromises may be necessary to ensure the future of any heritage
building. However, whether this particular site continues as a refinery or changes
to another use, there is also a clear need to ensure that any modifications do
not put the site in jeopardy.
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