The Beehive

You're standing in front of what might be the most divisive building in New Zealand. The Beehive — officially the Executive Wing of Parliament — started life as a sketch by Scottish architect Sir Basil Spence during a visit in nineteen sixty-four. The story goes that he drew it on a napkin, though whether that's true or just a good yarn is anyone's guess. What's certain is that government architect Fergus Sheppard and the Ministry of Works turned Spence's concept into reality, and construction ran from nineteen sixty-nine until it was formally opened in nineteen seventy-seven.

Wellingtonians hated it from day one. The shape — modelled on a traditional beehive skep — was called everything from a monstrosity to a wedding cake. In two thousand and nine, a travel website ranked it the third ugliest building on Earth. But love it or hate it, you can't ignore it, which is maybe the whole point of political architecture.

The older building beside it — Parliament House, the grand stone-faced one — was completed in nineteen twenty-two, though MPs were so desperate to leave their previous quarters that they moved in four years early while it was still unfinished. Behind both buildings sits the Parliamentary Library, the oldest surviving part of the complex, dating from eighteen ninety-nine. It's the only piece that survived a catastrophic fire in nineteen-oh-seven that gutted everything else.

Now here's the thing about this ground. In eighteen ninety-three, right here, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant women the right to vote. The petition that made it happen carried over twenty-five thousand signatures on a single sheet — nearly a quarter of all adult European women in the country. It's now a UNESCO Memory of the World document. You can see it at the National Library's He Tohu exhibition, about ten minutes' walk from here. Unrolled, the petition stretches three hundred metres.