Northcote Memorial Hall

On 10 March 1956 the Minister of Internal Affairs S.W. Smith opened the Northcote War Memorial in Rodney Road, next to the Northcote Borough Council offices. The war memorial building, designed by Thorpe Cutter Pickmere & Douglas, incorporated a community hall, a public library and the local Plunket rooms. The Northcote First World War roll of honour, a wooden tablet which had originally been unveiled in the Council offices in 1917, was transferred to the new building, accompanied by a new marble ‘Borough of Northcote Roll of Honour’ listing the borough’s dead from both wars (this includes 39 names from the First World War and 21 names from the Second World War, and is thus a more comprehensive list of those who died than both the First World War roll of honour and the original Northcote war memorial).

In July 1957 a memorial book designed by Gordon Kilham was also installed in a glass case in the foyer.

In 1967 the library moved to the new Council building in Kilham Avenue. In 1982 it moved again, into a new building in the Northcote Shopping Centre. The library has sometimes been referred to as a war memorial library, but it lost any claim to this status when it moved out of the Rodney Road building. However, for some years the Northcote roll of honour book has been displayed in the library. The memorial tablets remain on display in the hall, which is now generally referred to as the Northcote War Memorial Hall.

Sources: ‘Northcote War Memorial’, NZ Herald, 5/3/1956; ‘Northcote War Memorial Opened’, NZ Herald, 12/3/1956; ‘War Memorial Book is of Distinctive Design’, Waitemata News, 3/7/1957; Judith Christmas, A History of Northcote, Northcote, 1983, pp. 34-5, 44.