The Anglican Church’s presence in Wellington dates from the arrival of Bishop Selwyn in 1842. The first St Paul’s Church was built in 1844. The first St Paul’s Schoolroom was built in 1852 from subscriptions collected and a grant of land in Sydney Street from Governor Sir George Grey. Initially, education in New Zealand was pursued by private initiatives or churches, which were encouraged by the government.
The school was opened in January 1852 by Bishop Selwyn. It was a timber framed and clad building with a shingled roof, located at 21-25 Sydney Street East (now Kate Sheppard Place). The demand for education in Wellington was such that within three months there were 83 pupils. The school was also widely used outside school hours by the church and community. In 1895 the original schoolhouse was burnt to the ground. There was considerable debate before it was decided to replace the building. The Anglican Church’s diocesan architect Frederick de Jersey Clere’s firm Clere, Fitzgerald and Richmond were retained to design the new schoolroom, though it was John Swan, then working for the Clere practice, who drafted the actual design. The schoolroom was built on the same site as the previous school structure. The contract price was £1050 and work was expected to be completed by mid-November 1897; it opened on 23 December 1897. The interior of the schoolroom originally consisted of a central hall with six flanking schoolrooms. The building was relatively well-appointed and there were four fireplaces, six WCs. The adjoining caretaker’s accommodation was built soon after.
The building had new uses - in 1901 it was described as St Paul’s Hall and Gymnasium. Diocesan synod meetings, scout and guide groups, dances and lectures were all held there. There have been suggestions that it was the setting for the Katherine Mansfield short story ‘The First Ball’. It was later used as a rehearsal space by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
In 1943 a proclamation took the land and schoolroom for public works purposes but it did not take immediate effect. Although the school closed by 1950, the parish continued to use the hall until the late 1960s. In 1971 the Ministry of Works took over the building for use as a civil engineering draughting centre and later as a systems laboratory. At one point the building was expected to be removed for the new High Court but this was built further down Molesworth Street.
A 1996 visit to the building at its previous Kate Sheppard Place address found that the two flanking ‘lean-to’ ‘aisles’ had been adapted to form a kitchen, cloakroom and ablution areas, and the hall had been reduced in size with the addition of a mezzanine, and by the removal of the stage. On its original site in Kate Sheppard Place there was a substantial addition at the back that was the living quarters for the caretaker; this was demolished when the building was relocated to Thorndon School in 1999. The building has been adapted to serve as the Thorndon School Hall and is now in use as a secular educational building.
Old St Paul’s Schoolroom’s heritage value comes from its extended and varied use over the past 110+ years.
