Commercial Bay

This guide to Commercial Bay in Auckland starts with a vanished harbour inlet the local Maori called Onepanea, and with John Logan Campbell, the Scottish doctor who pitched a tent on its shoreline in eighteen forty betting the site would become the new colony's capital. It follows the decades of quarrying and land reclamation that followed, as gangs cut down two headlands and dumped the rubble into the sea. Along the way it traces how ships once crowded the bay to unload flax and timber before tents gave way to New Zealand's first business district.