Rural idyll to urban jungle —
Auckland’s Lincoln Rd has for decades been a key arterial route connecting the west to the inner city — but it was not always the expansive four-lane highway it is today. It was once little more than a gravel path, surrounded by orchards and vineyards, with the steady hum of bees, birds and the nearby creek bubbling softly. This countryside vision is one from years long gone by, erased by the urban highway and accompanying grey noise of humankind’s urban footprint. Regions on the fringe of Auckland’s metropolis are continually being touched by the everexpansive reach of urban development.
talks to two Lincoln Rd residents who for 60 odd years have watched through the windows of their modest homes as the trees were felled, concrete poured and buildings and fences erected
A country paradise
When Hazel Tarr, 86, first moved into her home at the motorway end of Lincoln Rd with her young family in the Easter of 1957, civil infrastructure was scarce and her three-bedroom bungalow had just been built.
The Henderson township was going through a period of growth as people in farming and fruit growing boosted the population from 199 in 1886 to 2750 in the year Tarr arrived.
The road outside her new home was gravel, surrounded by the wide green landscape and leafy orchards, vineyards and a market garden.
Behind her house was a small creek her kids used to play by.
“They had tree huts, they would take off for the whole morning and not come back for tea.” She said it was a marvellous place to raise kids and to be a part of the community.
As the recently published book Henderson Heart of the West says, New Zealand in the 1950s was “a model welfare state, with a high birth rate, universal benefits, high living standards and few unemployed”.
Humanity’s mark
But the passage of time and people has changed the landscape and as Brian Corban wrote in the book, “the places of my childhood have now effectively been destroyed . . . the rural sleepy almost paradise atmosphere in summer”.
Today the area around Lincoln Rd is far from paradise, the surrounding greenery simply a backdrop for the suburb’s roads and buildings. Dubbed Heart Attack Alley, its stores full of natural produce have been largely replaced by takeaway joints — a whopping 55, including McDonald’s, Texas Chicken, Denny’s, bakeries, Kings Roast and Dunkin Donuts.
The stores are well-serviced by Henderson population, which has grown significantly to 14,120 (North, West and South — total 119,900 in the Henderson-Massey local-board area).
An Auckland Transport (AT) count last August showed an average 46,033 vehicles traversed the long street every weekday. Traffic at peak times ranges from 3095 to 3363, with a backlog causing motorists to crawl for a kilometre or two along Lincoln Rd, stopped occasionally by one of the four sets of traffic lights from Te Pai to the motorway.
The once prevalent sound of the bubbling creek has been drowned out by the traffic, and Tarr’s once sparkling new home is showing its age.
Tarr could not imagine allowing her children the same freedom on the Lincoln Rd she sees today.
Jack Ross, 85, lives next door, having moved there in 1954, a few years before Tarr. He has lived in Henderson since 1936.
As a child he recalled walking to school in bare feet. “Not now, you don’t walk to school, you get driven.”
He described a sense of freedom being able to walk outside, not having to look either way for cars as a child dashing across the then-gravel path.
The sense of community was also stronger — or at least more out in the open. “You knew everybody too, now you go down there and you won’t know anybody.”
Meeting people is a challenge when most are simply passing through in cars, trucks, buses and