Bach (New Zealand)

A bach (pronounced 'batch') (/ˈbætʃ/; (also called a crib in the southern half of the South Island) is a small, often very modest holiday home or beach house in New Zealand. Baches are an iconic part of the country's history and culture, especially in the middle of the 20th century, where they symbolised the beach holiday lifestyle that was becoming more accessible to the middle class.

Bach was thought to be originally short for bachelor pad, but actually they often tended to be a family holiday home. An alternative theory for the origin of the word is that is the Welsh word for small, although the pronunciation of the Welsh word is considerably different. Baches began to gain popularity in the 1950s as roads improved and the increasing availability of cars allowed for middle-class beach holidays, often to the same beach every year. With yearly return trips being made, baches began to spring up in many family vacation spots.

They are almost always small structures, usually made of cheap or recycled material like fibrolite (asbestos sheets), corrugated iron or used timber. They were influenced by the backwoods cabins and sheds of the early settlers and farmers. Other baches used a caravan as the core of the structure, and built extensions on to that. Many cities were dismantling tram lines in the 1950s, and old trams were sometimes used as baches, most noticeably on the Coromandel Coast on the Firth of Thames where more than 100 were transported, sold and relocated.

A reconstructed example of a typical bach from the 1950s can be found in National Maritime Museum on Princes Wharf in central Auckland. The period-furnished bach is complemented with an adjacent beach shop with original products from that time.

While older baches tend to be fibrolite lean-to structures, modern kit-set structures are becoming popular amongst bach owners. Department of Conservation figures estimate that more than 50,000 baches exist around New Zealand (population 4.7 million people).

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