Charles Kettle

Charles Kettle is the man who designed the original town plan of Dunedin and was the resident surveyor who saw it through to implementation. Born in Kent in 1821, Kettle originally came from England to Wellington in 1840 and began work there as a clerk in an engineering business. He was involved in early survey work and exploration in Wellington and the Wairarapa but returned to England in 1843 when that work drew to a close. There he linked up with George Rennie, the original proponent of a settlement in Otago, and became active in promoting the Scottish settlement scheme. Kettle visited Edinburgh and studied the street plan of its New Town to adapt it for the planned ‘New Edinburgh’ in New Zealand.

By 1846 the newly married Kettle had secured an appointment with the New Zealand Company as the chief surveyor of the Otago scheme and returned to the colony. He recruited a staff of survey assistants and labourers in Wellington and then travelled south on the Mary Catherine. Over the next two years this group was busy laying out the survey lines to form the streets of Port Chalmers and Dunedin and began preliminary surveys of the Otago Block.

Much had been achieved by the time the first settlers arrived in early 1848, but much remained to do. The Kettle survey involved the first major use of trigonometrical survey methods in New Zealand and was a model of its kind. Kettle stayed on in Dunedin after his survey work was completed. He worked for a time as deputy-registrar of deeds but had ongoing disagreements with Captain Cargill. In 1851 he abandoned the struggle and took up land in South Otago.

Kettle was as successful at farming as he had been at surveying. By 1860 he was able to retire to Dunedin. He tried unsuccessfully to win representation on the Otago Provincial Council but did manage to secure a seat in parliament. In 1862 he was appointed provincial auditor.

Dunedin by then was under huge strain trying to cope with the hordes of new arrivals attracted by the gold rushes. Its primitive systems of sanitation and drainage were overwhelmed by the numbers of people passing through the town, and epidemics of water-borne diseases were becoming rampant. Charles Kettle took a keen interest in these town-planning problems. Too keen in fact – in June 1862 he caught typhoid fever and died. It was a sadly ironic end for the man who more than any other had shaped the embryonic cityscape.