THE

Windsor Reserve is now. In 1841, Lieutenant Robert Snow was appointed to command this fledgling naval base and moved to Devonport with his wife and two young daughters.

Soon afterwards, a signal station, which used flags to announce the arrival of shipping, was erected on the volcanic cone that Māori knew as Takarunga. Settlers renamed it Mt Victoria, and the area started to be called Flagstaff.

Over time, the naval base expanded, as barracks, slipways, stores and workshops were built. Farming, commericial activities and boat building began. Residents moved in and a community formed.

In 1874, the year after the North Shore Rugby Football Club was founded, a census recorded 969 people on the North Shore, including those living at what are now Bayswater, Northcote, Albany and Takapuna.

The 1901 census recorded 3823 people and 730 dwellings just in the old Devonport Borough (by comparison, Auckland’s population was 34,213, with another 15,000 living in Parnell, Grey Lynn, Newmarket and Onehunga).

As the new century dawned, Devonport was starting to look more like the seaside village we know today. The shipyards had been pushed off the waterfront; the main shopping centre had moved from the bottom of Church St to Victoria Rd and an impressive new post office had been opened; the main wharf was there too, with a regular ferry service to the city – an additional service to Stanley Bay was added that year with a vehicular ferry starting up soon afterwards; the wetlands and lagoons, which once made the peninsula look like a collection of islands, had been reclaimed and transformed into sports grounds and a race course; most of the older subdivisions along the waterfront and round to Cheltenham Beach had been built on and development was spreading to Narrow Neck and North Devonport; there was a water supply piped from Lake Pupuke and a sewage scheme was about to start discharging raw effluent off North Head; a gasworks on Lake Rd was providing heating and lighting to homes and businesses, and main streets like King Edward Pde and Victoria Rd even had gas street lighting.

A late-19th-century rugby match on what is now Vauxhall Reserve field to score. ‘Eaton placed an and time was called immediately North Shore the winners by 14