Basin Reserve

The Basin Reserve is known principally as a cricket venue. It is the oldest first-class ground in the country. But it is much more than a sports field. There is a cricket museum and amemorial to the founder father of Wellington William Wakefield.

The Wakefield memorial is now back inside the ground not outside as suggested in the audio guide!

The ground is within easy walking distance of central Wellington or catch bus number One or Three.

Historian Gavin McLean here explains how and why the basin came to be:

Why, in Wellington’s earliest days, did surveyor William Mein Smith select this shallow swamp for a dock when Port Nicholson could cater for any ship likely to come here? But draw it in he did, making it the ‘Basin’, or Dock Reserve. The dock and canal running down Kent and Cambridge Terraces lurked on plans until uplift from the 1855 earthquake all but drained the reserve. Now its destiny lay as a recreation reserve. In 1863 prisoners added their fill and three years later a citizens’ committee designated it a cricket ground. By 1868 there was a grandstand here and the Volunteers and a team from HMS Falcon had fought out the first match. We think of this as a cricket ground but over the years it has also hosted hockey, rugby union, league, cycling, rifle practice, band displays, dog racing, baseball, lacrosse, softball, open air religious services, opera, jamborees, military displays and political and royal visits. Some have been unusual or noteworthy. In 1879 the first public display of electricity in the country took place here. Twenty years later Captain Lorraine, balloonist, ‘aeronaut’ and blow-hard, got blown away, literally. He took off successfully but the wind pushed the balloon south-east, forcing the self-styled ‘King of Parachutists’ to parachute into Wellington College instead of the Basin Reserve, where the crowd was waiting for him. In 1913 some of the Buckle Street fencing was damaged during the waterfront strike. But since 1884 cricket has been top dog. Cricketers love statistics: by 1997 it had hosted 329 first class and international matches, the country’s heaviest tally. Here, a plaque explains, Martin Crowe and Andrew Jones set a world record partnership for any wicket against Sri Lanka. Now one of the country’s most significant grounds, the Basin was the first sports ground registered by the Historic Places Trust. There are several historic structures. The playing ‘oval’ (1863, although it was never that shape) was brought into the modern era in 1979–81 when the big RA Vance Stand appeared on the western boundary and the oval itself was altered. Older buildings include the late 19th-century groundsman’s shed, the 1923 gates (later named the CS Dempster and JR Reid Gates after prominent cricketers) and the 1924 Museum Stand, which houses the National Cricket Museum. But just outside the eastern fence is the most interesting item, the memorial to Colonel William Wakefield, leader of the New Zealand Company Wellington settlement from 1840. When he died in 1848 friends raised money for a memorial but, like everything to do with the Company, it went awry. They finally ordered this little folly from a British foundry in 1862 but it lay in storage for twenty years before the council put it up inside the Basin Reserve. Here it stayed until 1917 when it was exiled to its present gulag.

© 2002 Original text – Gavin McLean.

Further reading: Don Neely, 100 Summers: the History of Wellington Cricket, Moa Publications, Auckland, 1975, Don Neely and Joseph Romanos, The Basin: An Illustrated History of the Basin Reserve, Canterbury University Press

Historical Image Credit:Basin Reserve, 1870, Wellington, by James Bragge. Purchased 1955. Te Papa (D.000017)