What happened
The Carlton held the corner of Papanui Road and Bealey Avenue, at the northern edge of the Christchurch grid, and a hotel had stood on it since 1865, fifteen years after the settlement was laid out. The building that fell was not that one. Ward's brewery commissioned Joseph Maddison to replace it in time for the New Zealand International Exhibition of 1906, and the Historic Places Trust registered the result in 1981 as a category two historic place. The house is remembered for a run of firsts in the drinking trade: beer on tap at the end of the 1930s, a beer garden in 1947, a drive-through bottle store in 1954. It came through the September 2010 earthquake and went on serving while repairs were made. On 22 February 2011 part of the Papanui Road façade collapsed, engineers judged the rest likely to go in an aftershock, and the hotel was demolished on 9 April. Its heritage registration was cancelled the same year. Radio New Zealand, reporting what replaced it, noted that this was the second time in its history the Carlton had been rebuilt.
What is there now
A bar again, in a new building. A modern two-storey replacement went up on the same corner and opened to the public on 21 September 2013, built to 130 per cent of the new code and, by its general manager's account, argued over locally for its looks. OpenStreetMap records the corner at 1 Papanui Road as a bar named the Carlton, open until midnight. The name, the licence and the trade came back; the 1906 building did not.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap way 263291049, 1 Papanui Road, Merivale — OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), read 20 September 2026 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/263291049).
Sources
- radionz.co.nz, via the Internet Archiveweb.archive.org
- Wikipediaen.wikipedia.org
- openstreetmap.org
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