Daily Photo – Dunedin House & Otago
Recently, while wandering through central Dunedin I experienced a momentary bout of amnesia. The kind where you forget where you’re going, why you’re going there, where your car is parked, if I turned the oven off, that kind of thing! During one of these lapses in brain function, I caught myself gazing up at the buildings on the corner of Princes Street and Moray Place, wondering what once stood there. It seems, in this case, the answer begins with one of the most dramatic nights in the city’s early history when a fire swept through central Dunedin. It was so catastrophic that flames leapt across the streets and for a fast growing city in the middle of a gold rush built mostly of timber, it was nothing more than a nightmare.
The alarm was raised on a Monday night in April, 1867 when flames were seen coming from the shop of ironmonger George Willson – whose premises sat on the westerly side of Princes Street. Not far from where Dunedin House now stands. Within hours the entire block had disappeared under a pile of ash. The Criterion Hotel, perched right on the corner of Princes Street and Moray Place, vanished into smoke, the Theatre Royal and the Octagon Hotel were completely destroyed and by Tuesday morning, the heart of Dunedin looked as if it had never existed.
Yet, like many Dunedin stories, the aftermath was not just about loss rather more about rebuilding. The fire showed that wood possibly wasn’t the best building material to construct a commercial city from and that brick and stone might be a better solution. Within six months new structures were rising from the rubble ushering in a Victorian and Edwardian building era of grandeur and magnificence.
The corner where Dunedin House now stands would have been taken up by one of these masonry buildings. The old Criterion Hotel site was rebuilt to suit the wealth still flowing into the city. Herbert, Haynes and Company rebuilt their large drapery store, a business that later became the DIC and is now part of the Public Art Gallery block. For decades the whole area was filled with ornate nineteenth century commercial buildings.
These stood for roughly a century until they were removed to make way for the modern commercial block known as Dunedin House. It is not the grandest building in town, but it occupies a site that has seen disaster, recovery, architectural ambition and a complete cycle of change.