When the wharf reopened to the city

This is not the original announcement. The page that once sat at this address is long gone; this is a new history note on the same event, written by the site editors in October 2026. Our main sources are the Wellington City Council Archives record for the Overseas Passenger Terminal building, the Wikipedia article on Ian Athfield, and the Greater Wellington historic heritage addendum report on Clyde Quay Wharf (May 2020).

The redeveloped Clyde Quay Wharf was officially opened on Wednesday 18 June 2014. That date is recorded both in the Greater Wellington heritage report, which cites newspaper coverage from the following day, and in the list of Ian Athfield’s notable works. It marked the end of a construction period that had begun in November 2011, and the end of a much longer argument about what the old wharf at the eastern end of the inner harbour should become.

A wharf with three lives

The wharf itself is older than most of the buildings that look at it. Work started in 1907 and the structure was finished in 1910, built for the Wellington Harbour Board as part of a wider expansion of the port. It was one of the first reinforced concrete wharves in Wellington. Its position, well to the east of the main working port, turned out to be its weakness: it never drew much cargo, and for long stretches it was used more by visiting naval vessels than by merchant ships.

In the early 1960s the Harbour Board chose the wharf for a new passenger terminal. Post-war migration was still running high and most new arrivals came by sea. The wharf was widened and lengthened, the approaches were dredged, and the Overseas Passenger Terminal went up to a design by the Wellington practice Morton Calder Fowler and Styles. The council archive holds a 1963 building contract file and plans for the terminal from the Harbour Board’s contract series, a reminder of how much paperwork sits behind a building most people remember for its spire. The terminal opened in December 1964.

Air travel overtook the liners within a few years. The terminal found second and third careers as a function venue, restaurant space and exhibition hall, and after harbour boards were disestablished in 1989 the building passed to the city.

From terminal to apartments

By the mid-2000s the council was looking for a lasting use for the site. A proposal from the developer Willis Bond was accepted in 2007, with Athfield Architects as designers, and resource consent followed in 2008. The consent was challenged in the Environment Court in 2009 by the advocacy group Waterfront Watch, which did not succeed. The old terminal was demolished in 2012.

Not everything went. The 17-metre spire, four large wall mosaics by G V Hansen, some steelwork and some of the old piles were kept and folded into the new structure. Beneath the deck the wharf needed major work: roughly 200 new piles, extensive cross bracing, and a car park for about 90 vehicles suspended under the wharf surface. The heritage report treats the wharf and the building above it as one integrated structure, which is a fair description of how they now behave.

What opened, and what stayed public

The building that opened in June 2014 holds around 75 apartments on its upper levels, with shops, food and maritime uses at wharf level. The important civic point is that the ground level around the edge of the wharf stayed open to the public, connected to the waterfront promenade. People who never set foot inside the building can still walk out to the end of the wharf and look back at the city, which is much of why the site matters to Wellington at all.

The architecture borrows openly from the liners that once tied up alongside. The long, low form, the prow at the seaward end and the open deck-like levels all point back to the terminal’s purpose. We look at that design language more closely in Long, low, and light.

A note on timing

The opening came only months before the death of Ian Athfield in January 2015. His practice continued, and the building went on to collect a run of awards during 2015, which we cover in Awards era: reading the citations carefully.

We have not reproduced any speeches or statements from the opening. What remains useful a decade on is the sequence: a 1910 cargo wharf that never quite found its trade, a 1964 terminal that arrived just as its purpose faded, and a 2014 building that kept the public edge while changing almost everything else.