Shirley, sometimes referred to as Windsor, is a suburb of Christchurch, New Zealand, about 5 kilometres (3.1 mi) north-east of the city centre.

The suburb spreads across wholly flat land which before the arrival of the first European colonists in the 1850s consisted of streams running into marshland between weathered and grassy sand dunes.

Sheep and dairy cattle began to be grazed on the land within a few years of the colonists' arrival, the area being part of the Sandhills station.

Land began to be bought by families of small farmers from 1863 onwards, and during the rest of the 19th century the future suburb was a district of market gardens, dairy farms and small grazing farms divided by hedgerows.

The district's settlers were mostly English and Scottish, but some Irish families also settled, as well as – in the 1870s – a significant group of Poles from eastern Germany.

A small village of shops and one or two churches had begun to grow up by that time along what would later become known as Shirley Road.

The standard house built by developers was a one-storey bungalow of three or four bedrooms under a low roof in streets that sometimes followed the course of old streams, meandered in various artificial crescents, or else ended in cul-de-sacs.

[3] On her deathbed in 1868, she asked her son, Joseph Shirley Buxton (1833–1898), to gift land to the Methodists to build a church.

The building of the Shirley Community Centre, which was the original building of Shirley Primary School, was listed as a Category II heritage structure with Heritage New Zealand and was badly damaged in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquake.

[18] Marian College is a Catholic girls' secondary school which was in Shirley but moved to share space with Catholic Cathedral College in the central city after 2011 earthquake damage, and will move to a new site in Northcote in 2023.