Oriental Street

Welbourn's Oriental St takes its name from the ship Oriental, one of the maiden vessels to leave England for New Zealand carrying Plymouth company settlers.

Weighing 506 tonnes, she set out from London on 22 June 1841 and arrived in New Plymouth on 7 November 1842. Captain William Wilson mastered the ship.

Arriving offshore at the mouth of the Huatoki River, the Oriental was the third immigrant ship to disembark in New Plymouth. There were 191 passengers on board, including three births recorded during the voyage.

By all accounts, the journey was less arduous than the earlier voyages and some later sailings. Passengers wrote about the benign weather conditions, adequate food supplies and, for the children, very little schoolwork.

The reasonably fine weather resulted in a voyage of just over four months; the Amelia Thompson, which reached New Plymouth in September 1841 took almost six months for the journey.

While the street name has nautical origins, the street itself owes its existence to another mode of transport - Oriental St is one of four Welbourn streets established in the 1920s to house employees of New Zealand Railways.

Known as a "railway settlement", it was part of an ambitious post-war scheme developed by the Railways Department to solve a chronic shortage of accommodation for their employees. The prefabricated houses each cost about £700 and all had much the same floor plan.

As part of the radical restructuring of the New Zealand economy in the mid-1980s, the newly named Railways Corporation became a state-owned enterprise and all the railway houses were sold off, either to the existing owners or the Housing Corporation. Since then many of the Welbourn cottages have been demolished, relocated or renovated.

In 2007 New Plymouth school teacher Janet Murdoch was granted a Royal Society Teacher Fellowship to research the history of the railway settlement.

Her fascinating account of the area, The Railway Leads to Welbourn, is available in the Taranaki Research Centre | Te Pua Wānanga o Taranaki.

This story was originally published in the Taranaki Daily News.