Finger wharf to passenger terminal: a short harbour history

This address has been on the site since 2011. The original page is long gone; this is a new essay on the same subject, written by the site editors in October 2026.

Clyde Quay Wharf sits at the eastern end of Wellington’s inner harbour, between the Chaffers Marina and the Clyde Quay boat harbour, where the city waterfront starts to bend toward Oriental Bay. Most people know it now for the building on top of it. The wharf underneath has a longer and more uneven story.

A wharf built for trade that never came

The Wellington Harbour Board started work on the wharf in 1907 as part of a broader push to expand the port. Tenders were called that September; the first round came in too high and a second round followed. Construction ran into trouble with the reinforced concrete piles, which needed months of curing before they could be driven, and the contract was not completed until May 1910. The wharf opened for use later that year.

It was a modern structure for its time, built on reinforced concrete piles and fitted with electric lighting and a weighbridge, and it is often described as Wellington’s first reinforced concrete wharf. It was intended partly for coal. Its location was also chosen to shelter part of the harbour to the west. But it sat a long way from the rest of the working port, and the cargo never arrived in volume. For much of its early life it was used more by visiting warships than by merchant vessels.

The terminal years

In March 1961 the Harbour Board picked the under-used wharf for a new purpose. Post-war immigration had peaked in the late 1950s, most migrants still arrived by sea, and the existing passenger facilities elsewhere on the wharves were regarded as inadequate. The Overseas Passenger Terminal was designed by the Wellington firm Morton Calder Fowler and Styles and built by Fletcher Construction.

Work began in 1962. Part of the old wharf came out, the approaches were dredged for larger ships, and the structure was widened and lengthened on new timber piles. The terminal opened on 7 December 1964, and the first liner berthed the next morning. Wellington City Council Archives holds a 1963 Harbour Board building contract file and plans for the terminal, one of the more tangible records of that period.

The timing was poor. Within a few years most international travellers were arriving by air. The terminal still hosted some cruise ships, but its real second life was social: it became one of the city’s busier function venues, and later housed restaurants, exhibitions and marine businesses. After harbour boards were disestablished in 1989, the building passed into council hands.

Redevelopment

By the mid-2000s the council was looking for a long-term use. Willis Bond’s proposal for apartments, designed by Athfield Architects, was accepted in 2007. Construction began in November 2011, the terminal was demolished in 2012, and the new building was officially opened in June 2014. The 17-metre spire and four wall mosaics from the terminal were kept and reinstated, along with some steelwork and old piles. We cover the opening in more detail in When the wharf reopened to the city.

Is it a heritage place?

This is where the story gets interesting. Many Wellingtonians remember the terminal fondly, and the wharf is over a century old. Yet when it was last formally assessed, neither the wharf nor the building was listed. A 2020 historic heritage addendum report prepared for Greater Wellington assessed the wharf and the apartment building together as a single structure. It recorded the place as not listed and concluded that it had low heritage value, mainly because so little of the 1910 wharf or the 1960s terminal survives in visible form. It recommended against adding it to the regional plan’s heritage schedule.

The report is careful to separate two kinds of value. It credits the current building with real architectural merit and strong townscape presence, and notes that a large apartment building on a finger wharf is a rare type in Wellington. But architectural quality from the twenty-first century is not the same thing as historic heritage, and the old fabric that remains is fragmentary: a few concrete piles, the heavy timbers at the seaward end, the spire and the mosaics.

For anyone interested in Wellington’s harbour history, that is a useful lesson. A place can be important to a city’s memory without meeting the tests for formal protection. If you want to check the status of any building yourself, Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga keeps the national List, and district and regional plans carry their own schedules.