Grahamstown, at the northern end of Pollen St, is a quirky historic shopping precinct full of cafes, antiques, art galleries, museums and the Grahamstown Market.

Grahamstown sprung up from the gold rush of 1868 when ex-provincial superintendent Robert Graham shrewdly calculated that a large flat area, used by Māori for cultivation and around the site of the Tarakonaiti pā, would make suitable land for another township. He first leased, then purchased the block that he would call Grahamstown.

With the gold rush in full swing, Graham’s new township soon overshadowed neighbouring Shortland. The two settlements were connected by Pollen Street, a rough unsurfaced thoroughfare 2 km long, and were amalgamated into the larger borough of Thames in 1873.

Records show that by August 1868 the population on the Thames field had reached 18,000, surpassing that of Auckland. The building frenzy on the Thames continued unabated. Demand was so high for dwellings that a number of buildings in Auckland were uprooted and barged across the Hauraki Gulf. In the following months, shops, hotels, restaurants, a theatre and even a music academy sprang up in Grahamstown amid the industrialised labyrinth of poppet heads, stamper batteries, tramlines carting ore, tailings pits, water races and the stables, foundries, smithies and all manner of other workshops that serviced the mines.

In Grahamstown, now the commercial heart of the Thames, each new gold find was announced on Scrip Corner, at the intersection of Brown and Albert Streets, opposite Curtis’s Wharf and the Pacific Hotel (now Victoria Park).

These heady fortunes, and others that followed, were broadcast to investors around the globe, putting the Thames goldfield prominently on the world map.

Grahamstown’s star continued to shine as the steamers plied backwards and forwards across the Firth of Thames, discharging passengers and produce at the wharves. The rhythmic din of the quartz-crushing stamper batteries reverberated through the streets, setting the daily tempo like some gigantic pulse, oscillating through the veins of the townsfolk. By 1871, some 45 coal-fired batteries, each with a head of around 25 stampers, were thunderously operating day and night.

Today, what is left of Grahamstown’s 19th-century buildings—some of New Zealand’s earliest mining-town architecture—is a reminder of New Zealand’s pioneering past.

Plenty of relics remain of the more than 100 hotels, government buildings and shops that sprouted during the heyday of the Thames goldfield. The 1870s shop-front facades still project a frontier-town countenance and The School of Mines, Bella St Pumphouse and The Goldmine Experience link us directly to the past – where it’s easy to conjure up images of illustrious pioneers strolling the streets or toiling in the goldfields.