Wellington’s memories and taonga move to Te Matapihi

Over the past two years, the Archives team  has been preparing to relocate from its current location on Barker Street to two new homes in the city centre - Te Matapihi ki te Ao Nui, Wellington’s central library, and the new Wellington City Council building on Jervois Quay.

The move will allow visitors to access these archives both in person and online in Te Matapihi when it opens in March 2026, alongside spaces designed to explore knowledge and connections to the people, land, and culture of Wellington.

Senior Archivist Georgina Parker says that this move has been years in the making.

“We’ve been planning this project for more than 10 years. Over the last three years we’ve been working with architects, engineers, mana whenua, librarians, project managers and countless others to design our perfect new homes. As well as a big learning curve, it’s also been a huge responsibility and great privilege to be advocating for the collections so directly.

“On top of planning for the future spaces, we’ve also been preparing the collection for the move. We need to make sure we know exactly what we have, where it is, whether it’s ready to move and what we need to do to get it ready if it’s not."

As part of this work, the team has been doing what everyone does when it comes to moving house – they’ve been putting things into boxes. 

With so many fragile, important and irreplaceable items in the collection, the team needs storage made from archive-friendly materials. These are acid-free, anti-static and won’t damage the archives.

Most of the items will remain in the boxes even after the move, so the boxes need to last a long time and keep these items protected.

Back before A4 paper and standardised book sizes, volumes and ledgers were made in whatever size suited the creator, says Georgina . 

“We can’t always use off-the-shelf products and many of our items require their own, bespoke boxes. One of our biggest challenges was working out how to safely house almost 1,000 ‘Rate Books’. These are the books which recorded when property owners paid their rates. As you needed to own property to vote, they also doubled as the electoral roll.

These books are incredibly important for anyone researching their whakapapa or family history so we need to do all we can to keep them safe. 

“Unfortunately, none of the boxes commercially available offered a good fit for these precious taonga. This could have caused a big problem for us, but we’ve been very lucky to have the help of Port Nicholson Packaging in Petone.”

Port Nicholson Packaging has been crucial in preparing for the move. This small but mighty, family-run business is one of the main suppliers to archives and heritage institutions across the country. They have been working with Wellington City Archives for the past two years to design a range of boxes to meet the varied needs of the items in the collection, says Georgina. 

“We managed to order so many boxes that at one point New Zealand ran out of acid-free cardboard, and more had to be shipped in to keep up with our demand!”

Manager of Port Nicholson Packaging Rhys van Boheemen says that they take preserving Wellington’s historic records very seriously. 

“Because the items will be stored for a long time, we don’t want any damage coming from the packaging itself. The key to this is acid-free cardboard which has a buffer that basically prevents the acids in cardboard from spreading, which is not something you run into often because most boxes aren’t really designed for long term storage. If it goes into the archives, then you know it’s got to last hundreds of years.”

There is a lot of science behind the creation of these archival boxes, explains Rhys. 

“The most common box that we do for archives at both Wellington City, Archives New Zealand and places like that is called a London box. A London box is set for document size - a lot of people think it’s named after the city, but it was named after the person who created it.

“If a custom size is needed, like a big book, then the archives provide us with specific measurements and we can make a sample on a die. A die is mounted metal on plywood that can then be put in a machine. The machine plots around it with a little knife and cuts the cardboard and creates creases for us to build the boxes. We then bring it to the archives so they can test it out and see that it’s the right size.”

Rhys is in awe of the actual work that goes into the archives and how it holds so many of Wellington’s memories. 

“It’s so interesting going into the archives and seeing everything they store and all the records going back 150 years. It’s amazing stuff.

“It’s really cool to know that know the products we’re making will last such a long time, and that we’re helping to preserve part of Wellington's history.”

When Te Matapihi reopens in March 2026 it will once again be an integral part of the beating heart and life of our capital city. It will be a modern, uniquely Wellington space that brings our mana whenua history and stories back to our waterfront. It will house integrated Library, City Archives, and Capital E services and be a space for everyone, with each experience a window to exploration, discovery, connection, and belonging.  

Find out more about the project on our website.