Reclamation of Wellington Harbour

The reclamation of Wellington Harbour started in the 1850s, originally to increase the amount of usable flat land for Wellington city. Reclamations in the 1960s and 1970s were to meet the needs of container shipping (containerisation) and new cargo handling methods. Reclamation has added more than 155 hectares to Wellington.

A plan for the New Zealand Company's new settlement of Britannia at Pito-one (Petone) had been prepared in England by Samuel Cobham. The key elements of his city were a large amount of flat land on the shores of a harbour, traversable by a navigable river. When surveyors arrived in 1840 on the Cuba led by Captain William Mein Smith, it was determined that the Hutt River was not navigable and, due to its tendency to flood, was not appropriate to support a major city. For these reasons the new settlement was relocated to the southern shores of Port Nicholson and renamed Wellington.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield of the New Zealand Company had devised a system of 'packages' of land for colonists of one town acre each. Cobham's Brittania consisted of 1100 1-acre (4,000 m²) town sections, which William Mein Smith struggled to fit into the new location. These sections were squeezed into the available space by sacrificing many of the planned amenities such as parks, reserves, ports, libraries and many other public areas identified in the original plan. For this reason, from Wellington's outset, there was a need for extra land.

While large scale reclamation began in the 1850s, the earliest reclamations in Wellington were conducted by private citizens. A popular story of the first reclamation conducted in Wellington was that done by George Bennet. Bennet had arrived in 1848 on the Berenicia and purchased a hilly section at Windy, or Clay Point (what is now the corner of Lambton Quay and Willis Street). At that time, Windy Point was a precipice with a narrow and often impassible path connecting Willis Street to Beach Road (now Lambton Quay). Bennet commenced, to the amusement of neighbours, with pick-axe, shovel and barrow to move earth from the Point, tossing the spoil onto the path and into the harbour, thus widened the track and performing Wellington's first reclamation.

...
Wikipedia