Missing from Beaumont Street

'All these shops, but nowhere to buy a nail!'

This was my husband’s recurring lament, after we moved to live in Hamilton. We love being in close walking distance to a wide range of shops and services. It wasn’t long, though, before we discovered some serious gaps in the retail mix.

The romance of timber

'Timber is the thing,' Frank Standen told his daughter Jan. 'It’s all in the taste.'
Years later, her father long gone, Jan Pilcher wishes she had asked him what he meant.

'My beloved Beaumont Street'

'I was so happy growing up there, and have tried to recall the events and experiences that made it so. I want others to be happy there, in the future.'

So wrote Margaret Colditz, in May 1990. The earthquake in December, 1989 had changed Hamilton’s main street irrevocably. People who had lived there all their lives told her they felt that with the terrible carnage to the street, 'part of them had died.'