Ponsonby Central

Ponsonby Central
by The Auckland PsychogeographerIt’s not hard to be grateful to Ponsonby Central for creating a real point of focus in an area that as it gentrified over the years, lost more than a little sense of place.

For much of the 2000’s Ponsonby Road felt more like an amorphous strip of shops and cafes, with little of K’Rd’s quirk and none of Newmarket’s admitted functionality (graced in its own way with car parking and a train station). The Three Lamps end of Ponsonby Road - once the edgy home to the important Gluepot music venue - had seen its bohemian character (the Alhambra, the Java Jive) not just fade but be plastered over with the glum world of chain sushi and phone shops, discount pharmacy outlets and merciless banks.

Ponsonby Central took a rundown industrial site on the corner of Ponsonby and Richmond Road - was it a massive junk store? a surfboard shop? - and developed it with sincerity and attention to the building’s modest bones of steel, brick and glass. Conceived initially as a market with attached restaurants, the site spans two main buildings, with an all-important ‘laneway’ in between, plus a (devilishly expensive and generally rammed) carpark out the back. Upstairs on the second building are meeting and function rooms, tapping into the neighbourhood’s lust for PR launches.

The food market was the first serious crack in central Auckland’s supermarket dominance. Certainly weekend markets exist in the city, but the novelty of flowers, cheese, meat and wine from small producers - on a Wednesday! - made a big impression. The hospitality offerings remain consistently strong, with famously good Neapolitan style pizza and various high-end Asian-fusion places. The vibe of Ponsonby Central is a low-key rough luxe (the thinking person’s shabby chic) that owes much to a former neighbour - the late, lamented Golden Dawn, a hipster bar with no signage but plenty of festoon lights, that operated between 2010 and 2018. Unconventional - even challengingly cool - music, coupled with repurposed heritage architecture and slightly avant-garde food and wine, ensured an artsy, overtly female-friendly culture, distinct from the meat-market feel of other Ponsonby Road bars. For the moneyed mums of the area, this recipe persists to an extent at Ponsonby Central, a faintly erotic food court for the fashionable. Flowers, strong wine and stronger cheeses, bed linen and the occasion pop-up handbag stall; at least they know their market here.

As of mid 2020, further hospitality, retail plus office space is being built to the rear of Ponsonby Central - apparently using reclaimed bricks from Christchurch demo yards. No doubt it will add further growth to the waistlines of the area - but perhaps the real lip-smacking prospect for the locals will be the plethora of new carparks.

Image Credits: The Auckland Psychogeographer