Historical Weekend

This weekend seems to have had an historical focus. Last night we went to a 50th birthday party. The theme was 50s (as in the decade) so we went dressed in fancy costume which might have had a passing resemblance to what they wore at the time. Noreen dug out her genuine fur coat (bought from a second hand shop in Brighton in 1973) and accessories to match.I wore my tail coat – the same outfit I wore at New Year (the seventh photo down here).
Today we went for a walk in Jubilee Park which is in Lower Hutt below Normandale. At the end of the nineteenth century and for the first half of the twentieth it was the site of some grand old houses owned by professional people. They had tennis courts, swimming pools and extensive gardens. The land was acquired after 1950 to enable the Western Hutt Road to be widened and the houses were either demolished or left to rot. The vegetation ran wild and the area became a jungle. In the last 15 years a group of volunteers and the Hutt City Council have managed the park and cleared paths, restored some of the areas and put up information boards. They haven’t given it a web site yet. This is the best I could find.
The view overlooking the Hutt River, Lower Hutt city centre with the Wainuiomata Hill Road in the background.

One of the information boards gave the answer to a question I posed before. Who was Mount Climie named after? Well, J. D. Climie was a surveyor. He came from Shrewsbury in England and named his house “Longmynd” after a part of the Welsh border hills not far from there.

Lastly, here we are at the end of the walk, about to take off to La Bella Italia for coffee and stickies.