Christchurch’s wrought-iron garden gates
At the beginning of last century, most households didn’t have a car and so didn’t need a driveway and a wide gate.
Most houses would have had just a 36-inchwide pedestrian gate made of either wood or iron, just wide enough for furniture to be carried through or for a bicycle and rider to negotiate. Wooden gates were produced by joinery factories like Auckland’s Kauri Timber Company and metal gates either imported from England or made by local blacksmiths such as Richmond’s Dave Harries.
The iron gates needed only a small number of specialised tools to make. The gate sides of, say, 1½-inch x ⅜-inch steel strip would have had three narrow transverse slots punched by a hand-operated press along its length.
Tongues on the ends of the gate’s three horizontal members would be inserted and fixed in place by peening with a ball-peen hammer. The two sides would usually have had their top ends beaten hot over the horn of an anvil to form scrollwork. The lower part of the gates was traditionally a series of square-section uprights, which may have been twisted when hot using a vice and a bar with an appropriate aperture.
The rest of the gate would have been filled with combinations of lighter gauge scrollwork and square-section uprights. The top of the gate varied from unadorned, to a row of arrowheads, to elaborate iron filigree confections. The scrollwork was attached using steel rivets. These were inserted, redhot, into round holes punched by the press and had a head formed by vigorous hammering on a tool called a ‘snap’. The rivet was ‘upset’ by this process, the protruding shank transformed into a round head and formed a fastening of great strength. As the rivet cooled, it would have shrunk in length and pulled the metal pieces it traversed tightly together.
Over the years, most houses would eventually have had a driveway installed, and often this would have meant the replacement of the pedestrian gate with a much wider gate or perhaps a pair of gates. So, today, these iron gates are much less frequently seen.
The one we bought from a large demolition yard was the first they had seen in more than two years. It had been salvaged from an inner-city mansion, which had been wrecked in the 2011 earthquake. The previous owners were the proprietors of the city’s best-known department store — yes, that one — and so we had to pay a premium for the gate’s distinguished heritage.