Absolutely positively not the first plan for Wellington: Unravelling popular misconceptions about the process of planning New Zealand's capital city

Abstract

There is a popular view, one which has gone largely unchallenged in both historical and scholarly narratives to date, that Captain William Mein Smith arrived in Port Nicholson in 1839 armed with a map for Wellington designed by a Mr Samuel Cobham of London who had been commissioned by the New Zealand Company to draft a plan for Surveyor General Smith. Smith was expected to overlay this design on the fringes of the chosen harbour as best he could, so the story goes, but the landscape, the weather and the meddling behaviour of Captain William Wakefield forced the poor Surveyor General to vacillate between one end of the harbour and the other in a futile attempt to execute this orderly and loftily conceived arrangement. The effort was soon abandoned and, so the myth continues, a more pragmatic albeit less symmetrical but rather tastefully rendered design was produced by Smith himself and sent to London for approval and reproduction for marketing and propaganda purposes by the New Zealand Company. In this paper I attempt to prove conclusively that such an account of events is wholly inaccurate. I argue that neither Cobham nor Smith produced the first map of “Britannia” which was the working title for the capital until November 1840. The balance of evidence suggests that Charles Heaphy, a then junior employee of the Company, was in fact the first individual to render an outline of the new city. I conclude that the functional redundancy of Cobham’s Plan notwithstanding, it has a useful role to play in the history of planning theory.