Claire Mabey explores the past and present of Holloway Road, one of Wellington’s most mysterious and storied communities. 

All photos by Claire Mabey.

A pair of long-eared goats graze high on the verdant hillside. There’s a near-constant shriek of kākā flying overhead, passing over like fantastical creatures. The Lilliput library is stuffed and sits like an elven den, wooden and soft on the ledge beside the bright yellow house that used to be a post office. A heavy, fruity scent of roses hangs in the air. A skeleton in a magenta wig is draped over a wooden fence beside a hand-painted Toitū te Tiriti sign; foxgloves bloom pinkly in the grassy berms; another skeleton hand thrusts out of a front lawn to give a bony thumbs up. Three small Cruella de Vils trip down the footpath with their vampire dog, and behind them a fairy walks a cat-bat on a lead. A green-faced witch and a fortune teller oversee a table laden with lollies, corn chips and guac, a skull and a box of wine and are cackling at every cluster of trick-or-treaters who venture near. A single black cat treads silently down the middle of the road with the distinct air of owning the place. 

It’s Halloween and I’m here to soak in the particular atmosphere of Aro Valley’s Holloway Road. Storybook houses are adorned with ghouls, inviting trick or treaters to the threshold; their owners either nowhere to be seen, or costumed and parked on driveways with bowls of lollies. Jane, who has lived on the street for five years, is settled in a camping chair behind a table containing a single, enormous bowl of assorted sweets. A spectre made of floaty charcoal gauze, the size and heft of a toddler, is stuck to her fence and drifts eerily in the breeze while we talk. 

Despite visiting Holloway dozens of times, I feel a stranger in a strange land. There is nowhere else like this long and winding road, near enclosed by dense native forest, and haunted with histories both recent and ancient. Some of Holloway’s appeal is in its aesthetics: a juxtaposition of sprawling native bush with pools of cottage gardens contained by picket fences; and in the way that Holloway hides from itself, every bend concealing the next segment of historic homes; and in the majestic trees that look to be trying to reach their arms over the road to hold each other. It’s this blend of cottagecore and wilderness that is the flame to the moths of a sort of Holloway Road tourism that has developed over the past few years: cars drive slowly up and and down the street, people leaning out of windows taking pictures and pointing at the Victorian colours of the villas – bright yellow, deep maroon, dazzling blue. And at the cottages with awnings jutting out over the footpath marking where the grocers used to be, and the village shop. 

There’s certainly something about Holloway Road. An Instagrammable charm, sure. But there’s an ineffable quality, a sensation that I can never put my finger on. Holloway Road – how it turns, as if determined, away from Aro Street and rises all the way up into Waimāpihi Reserve – is thick with what one day you might call a sort of magic and on another day a profound heaviness as if the gully itself is pressing in, wanting to close over the road and cut it off from the world outside. As if it would eat it. If you could time travel to the Holloway of the past you’d bear witness to a thousand unusual happenings, scraps and dramas. Like the year in which a particularly bitter neighbourhood rivalry involved one neighbour shooting another’s pigeons. Or the night of September 26, 1974, when Dr Bill Sutch was arrested in the public toilet on Holloway Road, suspected of being a Russian spy. Or you might encounter the street’s foul-mouthed parrot that yelled obscenities. 

If the surface allure of Holloway Road is in its buildings and its bush, its long-term enigma is found in its people. Holloway Road has a habit of holding onto its residents. Some have been here most, if not all, of their lives. Like Simon Fern who is responsible for the drystone walls down the bottom end of the road, and Don Franks (the one with the communist sign on his house), and Finn McGill and his parents, Annie and David; and there’s Zil and Treefrog, too. The semi-static nature of the street means it’s knitted with the histories of people trying to get on with people: a storied place of characters and legends both renowned and infamous.  

A photo by Merv Griffiths in the Evening Post from 1983 shows two little boys, maybe four years old, five at a stretch, with bowl haircuts and dungarees. They’re sitting on either side of a ditch, a stream running between them. Finn McGill’s small face is lively but reserved. His friend Puck Murphy is more animated, his mouth open, flighty hair caught in the breeze. The caption says they’re playing in what was a rubbish tip in Holloway Road. A rickety makeshift bridge straddles the stream in the background, and beyond that is a higgledy assortment of fences that appear to be keeping the trees from invading the scrubby turf. Today, the bush that had been cleared in that area is now restored. In the 80s and 90s the sound and sight of a tūī was rare. Now, the trees are raucous with them.

McGill, now middle-aged, has been witness to both change and continuity as one of the long-termers of Holloway Road. He’s lived there most of his life, first in the house he was born in, now in the house next door where his children are growing up as the next generation of valley dwellers. Before we’re due to talk, he emails: “Be careful what you wish for. Holloway’s a funny spot.” 

It’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Some kind of confirmation that there’s something funny. And I want to find out what it is. 

Specifically: are there ghosts? A scouring of the internet brings up “sightings” but they’re infuriatingly vague, no leads to follow at all. Then there’s that desolate building right at the top of the street, tucked inside the Waimāpihi Reserve. Surely that’s a site of teenage seances, bumps in the night, a poltergeist? 

“Oh, everyone has a different story,” says McGill. His own house might be haunted by Fiona, the woman who lived in it until she died and McGill and family moved in. That desolate building inside the Waimāpihi Reserve turns out to be still in ownership and is known by the neighbourhood as The Lighthouse. It was used as a smoko room and potting shed in the 70s and 80s over the restoration project (the same one captured in the photo of McGill and Murphy in 1983). There are working bees every fortnight to tidy it up. 

But even if bonafide ghosts are scarce, everyone I talk to conjures vivid memories of people and times gone by. Everyone has a story about Martin Wilson who used to do a Halloween cat walk, where trick-or-treaters paraded their costumes down a pop-up runway with dry ice and all the fandangles. Wilson’s remembered for his work inventing fantastical events for Wellingtonians, like the first Cuba Street carnivals in the 80s, and the Birdman competition. Wilson was also an environmental activist, and by all accounts a pain in the arse for council: he started guerrilla gardening worm farms, the first of which was set up with bathtubs in a bus stop and eventually removed by the council in 2018. The second, Hotel de Worm, at the bottom of Holloway Road, was also threatened with removal until it was saved by Green councillor Iona Pannett. 

Holloway’s ghosts are of the regular kind: of the layers of history that echo through the memories of people. But what of its land? If the valley could speak, what would it say?

Before colonisation, the Aro Valley was dense with northern rātā and mataī and rimu. There would have been tōtara and kahikatea and living among them birds and shadows, and the steady breath of night turning to day and back again. At this time of indigeneity, the land and people and trees free from the projects of empire, the carving out of a literal hollow way (a sunken road with steep sides) and the name “Holloway Road” were a future spectre. 

Forwards then, to a Halloween of 183 years ago. On October 31, 1841, one Henry Mitchell and his family arrive by ship to the shores of Pito-one after months of sailing away from their homeland of Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. They take up a house on the freshly dug groove of Willis Street in the new city of Wellington and work as brickmakers. Mitchell and his brothers soon join the Wellington militia to defend the settlement. They begin to feel at home. They seek land to devour and use, and in 1857 Henry Mitchell has enough money to purchase 215 acres (87h)  from the New Zealand Company, a fat elbow of the lush, steep Aro Valley. He sets to work, clearing the valley of its trees to log timber and farm sheep that will soon fill the gully with the sound of bleating. 

In the 1870s Mitchell begins the project of subdivision. He builds a string of cottages up the Aro Valley to house the labourers that ebb and flow according to the rhythms of the vast farm and its needs. A “working man’s village” is born and is named Mitchelltown, in true colonial style, after its maker. Families proliferate and cottage industries spring up in response: there is a post office, a grocer, a school (where the girls and boys are segregated by a wooden fence) and everything else a working class settlement needs. 

The working man’s village is the 19th century foundation of the Holloway Road that enchants us today. The historic homes, the remnants of Mitchelltown, once considered separate to the surrounding city, were literally on the fringes of the urban beginnings of Wellington. Under the Town Belt Act the original line between urban and rural areas was Holloway Road, which fell on the rural side. Nowadays the shady side of the street is mostly rentals, and the sunny side belongs mostly to residents. Over the years there has been tension between the transient residents and their parties and couch burnings, and the lifers, but as gentrification and rental costs have soared there are fewer and fewer students to disturb the neighbourhood’s more steady rhythm.

Victoria University of Wellington, in the 60s, tagged Holloway Road as an ideal site for a sports field. The university hoovered up cheap properties, helped by a council designation over the land so that no building consents for houses could be granted, and rented them out. McGill says the university let its properties fall into disrepair and then sold them at market rates after taking rent for decades. The Crown, too, flicked off decrepit buildings in the 70s and 80s. Innovative buyers like Rebecca Hardie Boys, who purchased North House, and eventually Top House, gave the historic homes an eclectic, highly idiosyncratic, bohemian aesthetic (a term that sounds annoyingly capitalistic thanks to mass-market attempts to replicate what Holloway does all on its own).

McGill describes the Holloway Road of today as a colony of hermit crabs. People will talk to each other on the street, he says, people who have been there for 40, 50 years. But only rarely will you see the inside of their house. “Each house is moulded by their owner, like a shell,” he says. 

There is no house more exemplary of McGill’s hermit-crab simile than the home of Russell Taylor. About a third of the way up Holloway Road you’ll discover a house perched above the road, hidden by trees and shrubs, but with the contents spilling down stone steps and onto the footpath below it. There are trailers of wood, pots and bicycles; boxes of bottles, piles of fabric, crates full of building scraps that obstruct both cars and pedestrians. On my Halloween pilgrimage there’s a small table on the footpath at the bottom of Taylor’s stairs with a bowl of lollies, and a mannequin head wearing a conical purple hat, with a sign that says, “Happy Halloween. We do not want any tricks! Please take some and leave some for others! Russell and Helen.”

Everyone I talk to has stories about Taylor. Like the time he bought unwanted excess vegetables from the vege market and loaded them on a trailer outside his house and tried to give them away. Nobody wanted them, so he dumped them to rot and smell in inappropriate places. Or the time he kept talking about using trip wires to stop mountain bikers using the land up the back of his house (which he does not own), though nobody is sure if he actually went through with it. Wellington City Council, says one resident, have been trying to get Taylor to remove his stuff off council-owned land out the front of his house for 40 years. He never has, and despite threats, the council has never touched it. 

The intimacy of Holloway Road cultivates an enviable community closeness as well as the inevitable squabbles that pepper the street’s history of conflict and intrigue. The current state of the street’s own folk band, The Holloway Inmates (a name inherited from a once long-running netball team that fell apart years ago), is a good example. There’s a rift among the members at the moment. McGill suggests the faultline runs along a political divide. Sometimes Holloway arguments can fall into the genre of “I’m lefter than you”, he says. 

The Holloway Inmates have been an intermittent, yet integral, part of the Holloway Road annual progressive cocktail party initiated 12 years ago by long-term resident Susan Cooke. A flatbed truck trundles up the hill carrying the inmates and their guitars, banjo, double bass and fiddle. Holloway residents gather at the top of the street at the Waimāpihi Reserve and careen together from house to participating house, each one themed and signposted on a specially painted map. The band on the truck progresses alongside the revellers until all people and instruments and cocktails wind up at the bottom of the road at the park for the after party and the awarding of the progressive cocktail party cup – a large cocktail glass made of papier mâché and filled with sweets – for the winners of the progressive cocktail party quiz.

The commitment to revelry contrasts with an ongoing commitment to privacy, to that hermit crab existence: a legacy sparked by Mitchell and cemented by the legendary Swensson family who star in The Gully-ites, a 1993 Aries Productions documentary about Holloway Road and its long-term residents (which you can watch on Ngā Taonga Sound and Vision). George Swensson dominates the storytelling: he is Barry Crump-esque with long, bottom-heavy old-man ears and a head topped with a fedora. He was born in the gully to father William who, in the documentary, is celebrating his 107th birthday. Swensson junior ambles up and down the street, spilling forth about life in the gully: bagpipes every Sunday morning whether you like it or not, something about a prank with a rat on the end of a string, a green parrot that swore loudly at passers by, and always a strong sense of community. At one point David Lange comes to William’s party, moving at ease in the old villa among an elderly crowd, eyes glittering with memories. “I like being with old people,” says Lange. “I like the sense of history. I go away quite wistful but always happy that I’ve come.” Susan Cooke, who has lived in Holloway since 1986, remembers the visit, and the difficulty turning the prime ministerial car at the end of the street when it was time for Lange to go.

The Gully-ites reveals some of what makes Holloway Road so compelling, and so strange. The continuous habitation of original buildings, the sense that “characters” move in and never move out again. That the children of gully-ites continue the habit of living a certain brand of determined individualism.

Duncan Forsyth was born in Holloway Road in 1986 and appears in The Gully-ites for a few seconds. He’s only nine or 10 in the film, and is shown walking up the middle of the road, which was never busy. Forsyth says growing up in the gully was like being in a commune, that they did everything together. He remembers a vegetable co-op where neighbours banded together to buy vegetables, pooling them in a shed down where the playground is now, and divvying them out on designated days. Every Christmas morning they’d have a party at Waimāpihi Reserve, and Guy Fawkes was a group fireworks festival. Holloway is connected to a network of pedestrian-only side lanes which in turn connect to tracks that circle around and through Waimāpihi Reserve. Forsyth and his fellow kid-mates of the valley would wander those paths, slipping in and out of people’s houses as they pleased as nobody locked their doors in those days. “I took it for granted,” he says. “I thought everywhere was like Holloway Road.”

Halloween thins out towards the top where Waimāpihi Reserve begins. The closer I draw, the closer the gully presses in. This place, I am certain, is the source of the valley’s particular magic. “The lovely dead end,” as George Swensson says in The Gully-ites. As soon as you slip into the entrance of Waimāpihi the sensation of another world is palpable. The intensity of the bush that hugs the stream that is buried by Holloway Road. The stream runs all the way beneath the settlement and under the city beyond it until it reappears at Frank Kitts Park and falls to the sea. There’s a powerful sensation of approaching a sacred place: the font of eternal youth, the door to the underworld. Waimāpihi is the essential oil of Wellington: it feels, to me, like it is simply tolerating the human quirk at its feet. 

“The stream doesn’t stop,” says McGill. “It flows under [the road] and the wet air sinks. You can feel the breeze from the closed end of the valley slide down and down.” The workers’ cottages were not well built or insulated. They’re cold and damp. Jane says winter is deathly on Holloway Road.

The Waimāpihi stream is named after Māpihi, the rangatira of Kāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tara who is said to have bathed in the stream. Waimāpihi fed straight into Te Aro Pā which was where Taranaki Street and Courtenay Place now meet. Artists have created work, over the years, that calls on the now hidden stream and its significance to this built-upon land. In the 80s Shona Rapira Davies designed  Te Waimāpihi/Te Aro Park as an expression of the geography, the ecological life that was once there. Izzy Jo Te Aho White painted a mural on Garrett Street that honours Māpihi and the indigenous relationship with the stream. 

Inside the bush, it’s like you’re the only person left on Earth. It would be easy to keep going and explore Wellington’s vaster wilds. But I turn back and head downstream towards Halloween. 

When I reach the bottom end of Aro Street I meet a swarm of incoming zombies, witches, ghosts, Wednesday Addams, and a pair of Elsas and their mum. Some of them I know and I stop to chat. An outpouring of more stories about this place: the theatre productions that used to happen, the houses some of them have lived in, the love of the goats (owned by Russell, cared for by Mike, apparently). I realise I will never get to the end of Holloway Road. It is a living multiplicity of stories carried far and wide through its people, the threads crossing and crissing. It’s the kind of neighbourhood you might dream of, a closeness, and a complexity born of such closeness, that often feels lost these days. Here is where the delights and the dastardly of human nature, and nature itself, connect and clash and proliferate; the tales mutating as time goes on, folds back. Here is where you find the everyday magic that makes the world charming despite itself: connection, disconnection, reconnection, trees, kākā, foxgloves, goats, ghosts.

I turn out of the street and walk down Aro Street and can’t shake the sensation that I’ve left an entire world behind me.