Building Better Britain: Victorian Architecture in New Zealand, 1840 – 1901

The nineteenth-century colonisation of New Zealand was seen as an opportunity to establish a new society on the far side of the world that would perpetuate British culture while avoiding the poverty, overcrowding and industrial pollution that afflicted contemporary Britain. Here, a range of factors, shaped an architecture that was recognisably British yet distinctively of its place in the South Pacific. Ian Lochhead taught Art History at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, from 1981 to 2014.