Upper Hutt - History

History

Upper Hutt is in an area originally known as Orongomai, and that of the river was Heretaunga (today the name of a suburb of Upper Hutt). The first residents of the area were Māori of the Ngai Tara iwi. Various other iwi controlled the area in the years before 1840, and by the time the first colonial settlers arrived the area was part of the Te Atiawa rohe. Orongomai Marae is to the south of the modern city centre.

Richard Barton, who settled at Trentham in 1841 in the area now known as Trentham Memorial Park, was the first European resident. Barton subsequently subdivided his land and set aside a large area that was turned into parkland. James Brown settled in the area that became the Upper Hutt town in 1848.

The railway line from Wellington reached Upper Hutt on 1 February 1876. The line was extended to Kaitoke at the top end of the valley, reaching there on 1 January 1878. The line continued over the Rimutaka Ranges to Featherston in the Wairarapa as a Fell railway, opening on 12 October 1878.

For many years Upper Hutt was a rural service town supporting the surrounding rural farming and forestry community. Serious urbanisation of the upper Hutt Valley only started around the 1920s but from the late 1940s onwards Upper Hutt's population exploded as people moved from the crowded hustle and bustle of inner city Wellington into a more secluded yet sprawling Hutt Valley. In 1950 Trentham Memorial Park was created with an area of almost 50 hectares. Upper Hutt continued to grow in population and became a city within the Wellington metropolitan area on 2 May 1966.

Residential subdivision in areas such as Clouston Park, Maoribank, Totara Park and Kingsley Heights continued into the 1980s.

Towards the end of the 1980s significant travel delays were being experienced with road access to Upper Hutt. With central government reluctant to fund any road improvements in the area, Upper Hutt City Council commissioned the construction of a high-speed bypass that became known as the River Road. The road promptly ran at full capacity and, after several serious accidents that were a legacy of its origins, it was enlarged and re-engineered to cope with the growing traffic volume. As the name implies, River Road runs alongside the river from Taita Gorge in the south to Māoribank in the North.

Upper Hutt is in the bed of an ancient river flood plain and as such was prone to flooding. In the 1970s and 1980s, a stop bank was built alongside the eastern side of the river from northern Upper Hutt to the mouth of the Hutt River in Lower Hutt to prevent further flooding.