RAMSHACKLE TRIANGLE
Before he arrived in Christchurch, Scotsman John Jauncey Buchanan’s family purchased land on what would become the centre of Christchurch. It was a ‘valuable allotment, known as the Triangle’ which would be used for ‘his future sustenance’.
Buchanan was part of an illustrious naval family. They had emigrated to Australia and settled in Victoria sometime before 1849, but the teenage Buchanan had remained in Scotland. In 1849, he left for England, where he joined the waiting Canterbury Pilgrims to set sail for the New World. While he did not get a passage on the first four ships, he was able to set sail on the fifth, the Castle Eden, which arrived in Port Cooper on February 7, 1851.
Buchanan’s town section was three-quarters of an acre on what would become known as the ‘Triangle’. He let the section for Five Pounds per year to Mr J. E. Fitzgerald, the Immigration Agent who had come out on the Charlotte Jane. Fitzgerald put up a sod fence and grazed a cow on the section.
Described by an employee as a ‘precocious wastrel’, Buchanan took up dairy farming in Addington – and heavy drinking. After one drunken bout, he sold the Triangle section to cabbage farmer William Wilson for 60 Pounds, who became the owner of one of the most valuable pieces of property to be found in New Zealand. When news of the sale reached his family in Victoria, they litigated, unsuccessfully, to reclaim it on the basis that he was underage when the property was sold.
By 1864, the Triangle was one compact mass of houses occupying about three-quarters of an acre. ‘Cabbage’ Wilson leased it to tenants for 21 years, and it was the most thickly populated part of the town.
With 32 tenements, two stables and a bakehouse, the Triangle was part of the ‘populous and ill-drained portion’ of the city. An accumulation of offensive matter injurious to the health of the inhabitants of the city existed on the road, and the City Council gave notice to Wilson in 1863 to remove the noxious materials from his premises.
The porous nature of the soil of Christchurch, combined with the cesspools in the thickly populated parts of the city, had the effect of polluting the surrounding earth and creating toxic exhalations extremely detrimental to the health of the inhabitants.
So bad was it, in 1865, the Lyttelton Times likened the Triangle’s ramshackle filth to the back streets of New York. Their suggested solution was “to call for a special earthquake to swallow this rotting sore and hurry it from our sight.”