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Daily Photo: Princes Street & John Wickliffe House

Back in the mid-1840s, plans were taking shape for a new Scottish settlement in the South Island of New Zealand, one that its founders hoped would become a New Edinburgh at the bottom of the world. Thanks to the efforts of Frederick Tuckett, who had investigated possible locations for the settlement, the idea was moving from Scottish daydream to something approaching reality. As such, it was quite literally, time to start preparing the ground.

Enter Charles Kettle, a twenty-six-year-old surveyor from Kent, England, who was dispatched to the shores of Otago to lay out the new settlement. Having first visited Edinburgh to study its layout, Kettle set about borrowing the Scottish capital’s blueprint, with the intention of creating a nice, neat grid of streets modelled on the original. It was a perfectly sensible plan, except of course that Dunedin had hills that Edinburgh’s town planners could only dream of.

Nevertheless, Kettle arrived at Otago Harbour in February 1846 and, accompanied by more than thirty labourers, set about cutting lines through the bush and scrub, marking out the streets that would eventually bear familiar Scottish names. By May 1847, the survey was complete, the men had returned home, and the land fell silent once more.