Brooklands Chimney

Brooklands Chimney - the start point for all that surrounds and an interesting anomaly amongst the grandeur. The Pukekura Park and Bowl of Brooklands area was once part of a grand garden estate, begun in New Plymouth by an 18-year-old gentleman, Newton King, after he purchased the land from Captain Henry King (a distant relative) and George Cutfield in 1888. The house Newton King built was enormous and the trappings impressive but it had to be demolished when New Plymouth Council inherited it and could not afford the maintenance.

But the history goes deeper; Brooklands was not always about Newton King. This lone chimney breast dates to an earlier time, and a different man, to the original 1842 farmhouse, owned by Captain Henry King and burned to the ground in 1861 by angry Maori.

Captain King was a solid figure in the settler history of New Plymouth, born in Devonshire in 1873, and arriving as a retired Royal Navy Captain in 1841. His 50-acre block, Brooklands, was highly productive and decade long service as town magistrate earned him praise. He was reported to have been unwaveringly fair regardless of whether the parties before him were Maori or Pakeha.

However, the First War of Taranaki was not fair to King, and his son William was killed in a skirmish in the growing town in 1861, and soon after his homestead was razed in the fighting.

Captain King built a new home and persevered with the farm, land that Newton King later developed into today's park, and survived until the age of 91. The more modest King in New Plymouth's history is not always credited with breaking in the land which later became the city's crown jewel, or remembered for his even hand in the courtroom. The visual remainders of King's legacy today are only this chimney, the ambiguously named King Street, and a gravestone at St Mary's Churchyard.