Prosperous Pokeno
The small town bringing home the bacon
Helen Clotworthy stands outside her dark green Pokeno store, her words drowned by the sound of Mack trucks passing by and laughter echoing from icecream-lovers trying to contain the sticky mess dripping down their chins.
‘‘We’ve been living in Pokeno for 40 years,’’ she says as she picks up a piece of rubbish from a garden box beside the slightly bumpy but clean cobbled footpath.
Clotworthy and husband John moved to Pokeno from Auckland in the 1970s, seeking a rural lifestyle where they could raise their first child and start their own business.
They bought Pokeno Bacon in 1977 when elderly Percy Harris was ready to shut up shop.
‘‘It didn’t even have a name,"John says.
The store is located along the once-bustling portion of Great South Rd that serviced the northern section of the highway linking Auckland and Wellington.
‘‘It was always busy back then," Helen says, pointing to a small electric fryer behind the counter.
The fryer was used to cook sausage samples that they handed out to bacon-lovers passing through the store. ‘‘If they didn’t buy anything then, they would definitely buy something when they passed by next."
With approximately 20,000 cars passing each day, Pokeno was buzzing and business was booming.
But in 1992 business slowed down substantially with the opening of the State Highway 1 bypass. A road that was once near impossible to cross became deserted.
‘‘You could have stood out on that road and fired a gun. You could have slept out on that road, you could have just laid down in the middle," Helen says.
The new national highway system bypassed much of Great South Rd, cutting the economic lifeline of many smaller communities that had depended on the traffic.
‘‘For all of these years, we only had a population of 150 people living in Pokeno . . . so we generated all of this income from people passing by. They came to Pokeno for icecreams, they came to Pokeno for sausages and bacon,"Helen says.
‘‘Before the expressway, it was always busy – there were cars and people around all the time, but afterwards it was a ghost town.’’
Some shop owners were forced to close their doors, while others, like the Clotworthys, were forced to come up with a solution to combat the bypass effect.
The couple had to sell land to reduce debt, and attempted to open another store, which ultimately proved unsuccessful, in nearby Mercer.
‘‘People didn’t like that shop down there,’’ says Helen. ‘‘Kiwis are traditionalists, and that wasn’t a butchers shop down there, it was a cafe down there.’’
Plenty of attempts were made to revitalise the town, including a bizarre $20,000 year-long name change initiated by Jenny Hannah, an entrepeneur from Pokeno, who introduced the small rural community to the internet and convinced the powers that be to rename the town after her lingerie website: jenniferann.com. That was in 2000, they changed the name back in 2001.
New Zealand Transport Agency also made attempts to help mitigate the effects from the bypass by installing new footpaths, erecting new signage, installing new rubbish bins and adding garden boxes surrounded by seating.
‘‘It created a nicer atmosphere,’’ Helen says. John and Win McIntosh have affectionately been dubbed Pokeno’s ‘‘matriarch and patriarch’’. The couple have been living there for 58 years and have played a big part in the town’s resurrection.
They own many of the main street buildings, including the Pokeno truck stop, the bowling club, and a substantial amount of land around the area.
‘‘It was still a metal road when we moved here," John says.
They spent $230,000 setting up a new fuel station after Shell decided to close the village petrol pump.
‘‘In a way we felt forced into it but it’s gone a long way to keeping the place alive,’’ John says. The couple, and Helen, worked tirelessly to ensure the council built motorway-standard on and off ramps allowing easy access for passersby.
But nothing seemed to make a sustainable difference to the town.
But then came the Auckland housing boom.
Almost exactly half-way between Auckland and Hamilton, and only a 15 minutes drive to Pukekohe, Pokeno’s abundance of rural land provided a great place for people forced out of the big-city property market in the hunt for cheaper homes.
‘‘About ten years ago, Dines Group (property developers) came in and wanted to create some changes and create housing in Pokeno,’’ Helen says.
Once their resource consent was approved they had a 30-year development plan. But with the extreme increase in growth the town has been experiencing, the plan was condensed to 10 years.
The ensuing building boom as created an odd contrast: a kind of old Pokeno, new Pokeno divide.
In the new Pokeno, roads are smooth, grass is neatly mown, and gardens flourish. There is still the odd derelict home and a few potholed streets in old Pokeno, but there are also plenty of for sale signs with ‘‘sold’’ stickers emblazoned on them.
According to Waikato District Council, Pokeno’s population – about 2000 in 2013 – will likely triple in the next few decades.
In order to cater for this expansion, CareVets opened the town’s first veterinary surgery. Pokeno celebrated the opening of its first library last year.
Helen says the town is set to receive a dog exercise area, new footpaths, a sports reserve, redevelopment of the town centre including new retail store to give visitors more shopping diversity, and a supermarket.
‘‘We have already got people educated to come here, now we want to have a better selection for them to look at when they come here,’’ she says.