KEY POINTS:
It may sound surprising but one of the best places to get a feel for the history of Auckland City is at the corner of Lorne and Wellesley Sts.
I learned this from Adrian Oldfield, my guide from Auckland Walks, which provides a two-hour wander - well, if customers are enthusiastic it often stretches to three hours - through the city's heritage, culture and natural history.
The reason for selecting that particular spot is that looking from there down Wellesley St you get an excellent picture of the valley the early settlement was built in, descending to the Horotiu Stream where Queen St now runs, and rising back up to the Albert St ridge on the other side (plus there's the bonus of the lovely art deco Civic Theatre in the middle).
Gazing back down Lorne St you can see all the way along High St, so named because it was the town's original high street, lined with the shops and workshops needed by the early settlers, its many small buildings still preserving that atmosphere, though as Oldfield points out, they now tend to house cafes and fashion houses rather than chandlers and butchers.
It may seem ridiculous, given that the place is now swarming with cars, covered with asphalt and piled high with glass towers, but standing on that corner looking at the shape of the land I suddenly had a clear picture of what things must have been like in the 1840s, when the banks of the little river were lined with tents and whares, and the fledgling High St sprouted wooden emporiums offering everything from blankets to beans.
That picture was solidified when Oldfield led the way a short distance up Wellesley St to the Auckland Art Gallery, built in French Renaissance Chateau style in 1887, where there are some marvellous visual reminders of the city's beginnings.
Among the mokoed warriors painted by Lindauer and Goldie, for instance, are Te Hira Te Kawau, son of Apihai Te Kawau, the chief who invited Governor William Hobson to establish his capital on the Waitemata, and Paora Tuahere, who succeeded Apihai as chief, and was also a strong supporter of European settlement.
And among the many early landscapes are an oil painting based on an 1853 Charles Heaphy watercolour showing Fort St (then Fore St) as the waterfront, right alongside a painting by the Belgian artist Jacques Carabain just 36 years later, depicting a Queen St easily recognisable to present residents.
Those pictures give a feel for the incredible pace of growth in those early years, says Oldfield. "One minute there's a shallow bay with a settlement on its edges and the next there's a thriving city with impressive buildings and paved roads."
That, he adds, has been something of a pattern. "Every few years the city has a sudden spurt of development when everything gets knocked down and rebuilt."
Fortunately, a few grand buildings have "escaped the wrecking ball", an extraordinarily eclectic mix of architectural styles, which provided reminders of what the city has looked like at various times in its history.
One of those is the Ferry Building, built in 1912 in Edwardian Baroque style, start point for our walk and a great place for Oldfield to talk about the geological forces which shaped the city, the volcanoes whose cones are all around, the rivers and the sea.
In Queen Elizabeth II Square, the statue of a rangatira provides an opportunity to mention the thousand-year Maori occupation of the area - its name of Tamaki Makarau, or "Tamaki of the hundred lovers", testifying to its popularity - though our guide adds that "we don't want to tell Ngati Whatua's stories. They have their own guided walk [the Tamaki Hikoi] where you can hear those."
Then it's across the square to the majestic old Chief Post Office building, also Edwardian baroque, where those with a sense of humour can enjoy the display explaining that the original Auckland Railway Station was built close to this site in 1888, replaced in 1912 by the CPO, which in turn was transformed into the Britomart transport centre in 2003.
"That is so Auckland," says Oldfield. "Build a railway station, knock it down, and 100 years later build another one on the same spot at vast expense."
Another irony is at the top of the square where for 80 years the Chicago-style Dilworth building has been incomplete, deprived of the matching building which was supposed to have been built on the other corner to create an impressive gateway to Queen St, until the Tower Centre rose opposite and its mirrored glass created the same effect.
There are many such stories on offer. Winding uptown, on one side of Queen St, is the superb Greek revival facade of the old BNZ building, a marvel of the age when it was built in 1867, with a modern tower rising incongruously behind. On the other side, workers are stripping back the Jean Batten building to its facade so a new headquarters for the BNZ can be built behind it.
But Oldfield rejoices that the nearby Blackets building, dating from 1879, remains resplendent in its Victorian Italianate glory.
In Vulcan Lane, named for the Roman god of the forges once found there, are two of the city's oldest pubs, the Queen's Ferry and the Occidental, presumably founded to quench the thirst of the hardworking blacksmiths, and both still happily plying their trade.
In Freyberg Place, Oldfield points out some venerable stone steps now leading to that impressive temple of Mammon, the Metropolis, but which once took worshippers up to the High St Methodist Church built there in 1843.
In Bankside St a wonderful old slate-roofed workers' cottage, dating from the 1840s and probably the oldest building left in the CBD, squats stubbornly in the towering shadow of the modern apartment and office towers which have displaced all its former neighbours.
One of my guide's favourite places is, perhaps surprisingly, the very modern Vero building, New Zealand's tallest office tower. That's partly because the huge lobby with its many art works - including a great collection of classic Kiwi quotes - is open to the public, but also because the terrace, perched on the edge of Shortland St, is a great place from which to view the outline of what was once Commercial Bay, long since reclaimed as a site for the Downtown area.
Perhaps the most marvellous contrast of all is at the University of Auckland's central city campus where science buildings, in which students study the latest developments, cluster around the last remnants of the stone wall built around the Albert Barracks in 1846 when the fledgling city lived in fear of attack.
"This is a fascinating city, full of contradictions, always quick to demolish the past, but with plenty of reminders of our heritage among the modernity if you know where to look," says Oldfield, as our tour draws to a close.
David Hill, who started the walks programme a few months ago, sees it primarily as an introduction to the story of Auckland. "It's a wonderful story, and the people we tell it to clearly enjoy it, but it's a story that's not as well known as it should be."
Hill's enthusiasm for the city's story is endorsed in a quote on the City Walks brochure which records a Sydney woman as saying, "I had no idea the place was so interesting".
I suspect a lot of people who live in Auckland would feel the same if they did this walk.
* City Walks Tours cost $25 and leave from the Harbour Information Centre in the Ferry Buildings at 10am daily. See www.aucklandwalks.co.nz or phone 0800 300 100.
