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Original entrance to Marsden House before reconstruction after the Inagahua earthquake in 1968. Photograph courtesy of Geoffrey C. Wood |
The striking neo-Gothic building in Nile Street East has been an outstanding feature of Nelson since 1923, but the history of the land goes back to the beginning of the Nelson settlement. Town Acre 438 had been purchased on 12 January 1843 by J.F.Wilson and Thomas Marsden. When Bishop Selwyn visited Nelson in December 1843 he made plans for a church school. The Nelson Examiner recorded the plan of a spacious brick building, one hundred feet long, was submitted to the Bishop...; his lordship purchased the half of an acre in the neighbourhood of Trafalgar Square, all which it is intended to erect it’.
This land, the southern (Nile Street) half of Town Acre 438, was bought from Dr. Joseph Foord Wilson for the sum of £50, three months being given for the removal of cowshed and fruit trees. On his next visit to Nelson in 1845 Bishop Selwyn noted the recent erection of ‘a handsome Brick School House’ and the Nelson Examiner considered it ‘a great adornment to the little town.’
The paper on another occasion described it as ‘the most truly architectural edifice in Nelson: it is well and substantially built, with brick walls, and, ... with a bay window at the south-end, was really quite picturesque, and an excellent example of the old English style’.
The school was added to by Bishop Hobhouse and completely rebuilt by Bishop Suter in 1881 but was closed in 1895 after his death, and the building gradually deteriorated during the next seventy years. Besides the school over the next few years various buildings occupied the rest of section 438. At the north end a 5 year lease for £30 p.a. was promised to Mr. Yorke in July 1857.
On the west side the Church Warden leased to Mrs Taylor a house at £20 p.a. in November that year, on condition she spent £50 in repairs. Part of the remaining portion was used as a Parsonage garden and during the Rev. G.H. Johnstone’ s occupancy the land alongside the Parsonage was used as a paddock for his horse.
The house was sold in 1874 for £3.10 and removed and a new Parsonage built at a cost of £700 and dedicated in 1875. This is the building now occupied by Juniper’s Restaurant, but then the house had a verandah on the Nile Street side.
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