8122_Upper-Riccarton_Methodist-Church_Our-Land-Story.pdf
Church Land Story
About Us
Te Tiriti o Waitangi is “the foundation document for this land”, as expressed in our Methodist Church’s Mission Statement. As responsible members of this bicultural church, we endeavour to ensure that stories about our history are complete, beginning with the stories of Māori. In the early days of the Native Land Court, land titles were vested in individuals, and many of the Māori inhabitants were not recorded as owners. It is this kind of treatment that rendered Māori invisible, that denied Māori their existence. It is imperative that Māori and their own stories are made visible, are brought to life and that the earliest inhabitants of each piece of whenua are not only recognised but acknowledged appropriately.
As a Church in within the rohe of Ngāi Tahu, our land story begins within the context of their early history and experience of colonisation, which is laid out in this video. Our congregation thanks the Christchurch Methodist Mission for their willingness to share this work.
Land Story
Christchurch West Parish: Church Corner Site
Māori would never have occupied the area around the site of the present church as it would have been a dry, waterless part of the tussock plainland. The nearest mahinga kai (food gathering place) was probably what is now the upper reaches of the Ōtākaro/Avon in Riccarton (Pūtaringamotu). A Māori trail linking kainga north of the Waimakariri River with Lake Ellesmere (Waihora) apparently ran through the area of present-day western suburbs of Christchurch to avoid the swamplands further to the east.
Kemp’s Purchase, negotiated with Ngai Tahu in 1848, brought a large part of the land later comprising Canterbury Province into the hands of the New Zealand Company and, soon afterwards, its adjunct agency, the Canterbury Association. By 1855 all the plains and low hills had been subdivided into pastoral runs of several thousand acres and taken up mostly on a leasehold basis. The present Church site lay in the Coringa run which extended from the south bank of the Waimakariri to Church Corner, Riccarton. As the sheep station nearest to Christchurch, the best land was soon sold off as small farm properties. By 1865 the original 10,000 acres of the run had been reduced to 4,000 acres.
Riccarton, originally the Deans’ farm, was the name given to the much larger, sprawling district to the west of Christchurch city. A ‘Riccarton Wesleyan Church’ was found near the Racecourse as early as 1861. The site chosen for another Methodist church, also Wesleyan, was in ‘Riccarton Village’.
The ‘Village’ recommended itself because, however small, it had become the centre of an ‘Upper Riccarton’ district extending south towards Hornby and west towards Yaldhurst, critically located as it was at the junction of these two main routes leading into and out of Christchurch. When the Methodists arrived in 1886, it was already a complete colonial township, with a church (St Peter’s Anglican), school, hotel, post office, public library and cricket club as well as a variety of businesses.
It was this level of development that made it difficult for the Methodists to find a suitable site on which to build. Reluctantly, they ended up buying land immediately opposite St Peter’s on the corner of Church (now Brake) Street and the West Coast (now Yaldhurst) Road. Here they were to stay. A feature of church expansion in the colony, certainly in Canterbury, was the way the different denominations preferred to set themselves up without competition in quite separate localities.
The bought property – a half-acre section - was owned by J.R. Hill, a local banker and investor who had moved permanently to Australia in 1882. The price was a not insubstantial £150, indicating its position in a well-established settlement. Almost exactly a year elapsed between the land purchase and the opening of the new church building in September 1886. It was a classic Methodist collaboration between locals and the wider circuit, in this case led by the numerous and wealthy St Albans Church.
The advance of the suburban frontier from the 1950s swelled the congregation, adults and children, producing a closer occupation of the original block. A ‘Youth Hall’ was erected in 1956, to which was added a ‘Memorial Room’, mainly for Sunday School use, in 1962. The Circuit also required an additional parsonage, and a vacant quarter-acre section at 20 Yaldhurst Road adjoining the Church was purchased in 1965. The parsonage built on this land was occupied in 1967. The final development belonging to this era of expansion was a new worship centre in place of the small, Gothic-style, timbered colonial church that once had been the only building on the site.
A separate legal title was required for the now next-door parsonage for rating and insurance purposes. In recent years this has been used as a rental property, though let on generous terms as a care facility.
Another adjoining property at 6 Angela Street was bought in July 1981 with the intention of developing it as a youth facility, including the Church’s own Bible Class people. The cost was a considerable $18,500, largely funded by a loan from the Connexion’s CBL Fund. The first expectations soon faded and ‘Angela Street’ struggled to find much use, as well as being an old house that would eventually need expensive upkeep. The property passed out of the Upper Riccarton Trust’s hands to the Methodist Board of Administration in 1985.