Dunedin railway station

Dunedin's railway station looks like a town hall from Flanders that took a wrong turn and landed in the far south of New Zealand. It was designed by George Troup, who spent his working life with New Zealand Railways and later headed its architectural branch, in a free Flemish Renaissance manner, and its fussy, cheerful ornament earned him the nickname "Gingerbread George" for the rest of his career. Troup himself preferred the Scottish Baronial alternative he had also drawn up. The foundation stone was laid by the railways minister Joseph Ward in June 1904, and Ward, by then prime minister, opened the building on 12 November 1906. It came in on budget, at £40,000.

The effect depends on colour and texture. The walls are dark basalt quarried at Kokonga in the Strath-Taieri, banded and trimmed with pale Oamaru limestone, the two-tone stonework that marks the grand Victorian and Edwardian buildings of Dunedin. A colonnade of pink granite columns runs along the front, the roof is covered in terracotta tiles from Marseille and topped with copper-domed cupolas, and at the south end a 37-metre clock tower stands over the city. Seen from the Octagon, the station closes the view down Lower Stuart Street, which is exactly what it was placed to do.

Inside, look down before you look up. The booking hall floor is a mosaic of nearly 750,000 Minton tiles centred on a steam locomotive and railway emblems; the original wore out and was relaid as an exact replica in 1965. The best view of it is from the balcony above, which is edged with a frieze of Royal Doulton porcelain, while stained-glass windows by the firm Smith and Smith show locomotives in coloured glass. In its heyday this was the busiest station in the country, handling up to a hundred trains a day, and the main platform alone was about 480 metres long; each March it now serves as the catwalk for the South Island's main fashion show.

Regular passenger services have long gone, and since 1994 the building has belonged to the city council. Heritage excursion trains still leave from the platform, notably into the Taieri Gorge, and the upper floor holds the New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame and the Otago Art Society. On Saturday mornings a farmers' market fills the grounds to the north. In front, Anzac Square was laid out anew in the 1990s as a formal knot garden, which gives the best full-length view of the façade.

Getting there

The station stands on Anzac Avenue at the edge of central Dunedin, a short walk down Lower Stuart Street from the Octagon. Dunedin International Airport (DUD) is about 25 km away.