Bowen Crescent sign (2019). Mike Gooch. Word on the street image collection.
Bowen Crescent sign (2019). Mike Gooch. Word on the street image collection.
Bowen Crescent is an Opunake curiosity. It’s in two separate parts. Neither is shaped like a crescent. How did this come to be so?
Much of the land immediately above Middleton Bay is Crown grant land. This land wasn’t developed for housing to the same extent as the privately-owned land that surrounds it. With relatively few houses built, Bowen Crescent remained an unformed roadway, never required to be completed as intended. Today both parts of Bowen Crescent connect to other streets.
Some historians have suggested there’s uncertainty about who the crescent was named after. However in June 1948, the Opunake Times newspaper had no doubts. Its correspondent says the name commemorates Charles Christopher Bowen, an early New Zealand politician and legislator who lived much of his life in Christchurch.
In 1921 the northern section of Bowen Crescent was chosen as the location for the Opunake war memorial. The foundation stone was laid in a ceremony by the Governor General Lord Jellicoe that same year.
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