Bolton Street Cemetery

Wellington's oldest cemetery opened in eighteen-forty, the same year European settlers arrived. For over a century, this hillside was where the city buried its dead — from colonial governors to cholera victims, from soldiers to stillborn babies. Around eight and a half thousand people were interred here.

Then, in the nineteen-sixties, the government decided to build a motorway through it.

The Wellington Urban Motorway needed a route from the Terrace to the northern suburbs, and that route went directly through Bolton Street Cemetery. Approximately three thousand seven hundred graves were exhumed and relocated. Most of the remains were reinterred in a mass vault beneath the park lawn — a communal burial for people who had been individually mourned. Of the eight and a half thousand originally buried here, only one thousand three hundred and thirty-four headstones were ever traced. The rest were lost.

The Friends of Bolton Street Cemetery protested. They could not stop it. The motorway opened in nineteen seventy-eight, and the cemetery was renamed Memorial Park the same year.

Today, if you drive the motorway through Thorndon, you are literally driving over a former cemetery. The grassy strip beside the road sits above the vault where thousands of remains were consolidated. Samuel Duncan Parnell — the man who established the eight-hour working day in New Zealand — is buried here, metres from speeding traffic. So are Edward Gibbon Wakefield and William Wakefield, founders of the Wellington settlement, and Prime Minister Richard Seddon.

Thirty-five of the surviving headstones are made of wood — extremely rare survivors from early colonial Wellington. They're fragile, fading, and irreplaceable. The whole place is a quiet rebuke to the idea that anything in a city is permanent.