The Man Who Drew Wellington
In the late 1800s, Wellington employed an Inspector of Nuisances in order to investigate the many difficulties of the rapidly growing city. Police officer James Doyle took up the role in 1890, and would remain in it for three decades.
Doyle was, in his spare time, a strongman, boxer, and captain of the Irish competitive tug-of-war team, and his new role demanded an iron constitution alongside an element of diplomacy. He was called on to investigate whether buried bodies were polluting waterways, whether drains were excessively disgusting, whether henhouses were well kept, whether the smoke from the Mount Cook brickworks was too noxious, whether the night-soil men visited frequently enough, and whether the complaints of the Anti-Chinese League had any foundation in reality. As he traversed the city, he would have often passed a gentleman in a tweed three-piece suit peering into a device on top of a tripod. It was a theodolite, which measures angles: Thomas Ward, a surveyor, was committing Wellington to paper.
When Doyle took up his role, there was no accurate map of Wellington. But Ward had already pointed this out to Wellington City Council and secured the contract that was to define his life. Over two and a half years, Ward walked every street in the city. He drew the outline of every single building, including garden sheds and outhouses (but spared himself the effort of documenting henhouses). Historian Elizabeth Cox thinks that Ward may have knocked on all the doors of all Wellington’s houses, too, because he recorded the number of rooms in each dwelling, the number of storeys, and the building materials used. The resulting map is huge, spanning 88 sheets of paper, each the size of a poster.
Read the full feature at New Zealand Geographic here.
