Charles Kettle

Charles Henry Kettle (6 April 1821 – 3 June 1863)[1] surveyed the city of Dunedin in New Zealand, imposing a bold design on a challenging landscape.

The family were poor and Charles worked as a teaching assistant at Queens Grammar School in Faversham in Kent before sailing for New Zealand on the Oriental in 1839.

In 1842, he led an exploration party up the Manawatu River penetrating to the Wairarapa district, helping to stimulate its pastoral development.

He travelled widely for this purpose for two years and appeared before a House of Commons Select Committee on New Zealand in June 1844 as an expert on the country.

In 1861, he became a member of the New Zealand House of Representatives, the colonial parliament, the same year that saw the first gold rushes to the Otago hinterland.

Sanitation broke down and Kettle died of typhoid fever on 5 June 1862, contracted, it is said, from a too-close examination of Dunedin's drains.

Kettle set out to juxtapose formality, regularity, symmetry and proportion – relieved from monotony by some designed-in features – with a bold and rugged nature to make the design Romantic in the manner of Edinburgh and the fashion of the day.

While Edinburgh's New Town is a modern agora on a ridge, Dunedin's central city is a low-lying harbourside parade, set among bold hills, with distant views of harbour steeps and bush-clad ridges, a Claudian seaport, a park of orderly temples lapped by water, in a rugged terrain.

In Dunedin, Presbyterian fortitude or perhaps the wealth suddenly afforded by the gold rushes resulted in Kettle's highly ambitious plan being mostly realised and extrapolated.

[2] After having attended only one session of the 3rd New Zealand Parliament, he died of Typhoid fever on 5 June 1862,[3] and was buried in Dunedin Southern Cemetery.