Cuba Street

Welcome to Cuba Street, and the first thing you should know is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the Caribbean. It's named after the ship Cuba, which sailed into Wellington Harbour in January eighteen-forty carrying a survey party led by Captain William Mein Smith, New Zealand's first Surveyor General. A ship, not an island. Most streets in this part of Wellington are named after early colonial ships — Tory, Aurora, Cuba — though the ships are long forgotten and the streets have taken on lives of their own.

Now here's something most Wellingtonians don't know. Charlotte Bronte's best friend ran a shop right here. Mary Taylor — who'd been close to Charlotte since they were teenagers at school in Yorkshire — emigrated to Wellington in the eighteen-forties and opened a general store with her cousin Ellen at the corner of Cuba and Dixon Street. Right about where you're standing. She stayed for fifteen years, running a successful business in a rough colonial town, before returning to England. Imagine it — the author of Jane Eyre sitting in a Yorkshire parsonage, writing letters to her closest friend who was running a shop in one of the remotest cities on Earth. Taylor later wrote a novel of her own, Miss Miles, based partly on her Wellington years.

Cuba Street was pedestrianised in nineteen sixty-nine — the first street in New Zealand closed to through traffic. Before that, electric trams ran up it from nineteen-oh-four until nineteen sixty-four. By the sixties and seventies it had become Wellington's bohemian quarter — artists, musicians, second-hand shops, cheap rent. It was also, for a time, the red-light district. Today it's a registered Historic Area with over forty buildings of significance, and it remains the part of Wellington that most stubbornly refuses to become generic.