Briscoe and Company building

Here stands a key landmark in the Invercargill commercial landscape, which also represents a two hundred and fifty year legacy of trading which continues to this day.

Briscoes, known now to New Zealanders as a key company on the NZX stockmarket, and the place to buy cut-price small appliances, is actually not some new, rough and ready retail chain. It's origins are in Wolverhamption, England in 1768, where entrepreneur William Briscoe started trading in iron good and the such like, the colonial branch, Briscoe and company, shipping out to New Zealand in the 1860s.

Taking a head office in Dunedin and strong hold on the Southland market, Briscoes bought this building was as the Invercargill warehouse and office in 1901. It's had been constructed for Invercargill Businessman William Paisley in 1881, and sold to William Guthrie and Co in 1883. The architect was Frederick Burwell, who had designed greater and lesser buildings in the town and applied a little grandeur to the Dee Street Facade, especially to the windows. The second storey boasts a set of arched windows with a circular pediment, and the shopfront has grand doors opening to a large showroom.

The Dunedin warehouse was far more grand, being the head office, and accommodating vast volumes of imports from the United Kingdom and other origins, much of it large scale components, wholesaled nationwide for construction of the very infrastructure of New Zealand. It was on the corner of Princes and Jetty streets, and had a lift amongst other modern fittings. It is no longer there.

Thought the Paisley and Guthrie ownerships of the Invercargill building were comparatively brief, their names are still featured on the buildings, but it is the association with Briscoes which cements it's Heritage Status and indeed status in the Dee Street Facades precinct.

The Melbourne and Sydney offices of Briscoes which pre and post-dated the Dunedin enterprise, did not do as well and eventually closed, and the company eventually became publicly listed in New Zealand, now operating alongside it's subsidiary Rebel Sport in the New Zealand retail environment. The whole story is told in Briscoes 150 years in New Zealand.

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