Central Business DistrictThorndon is a historic inner suburb of Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand.

Because the suburb is relatively level compared to the hilly terrain elsewhere in Wellington it contained Wellington's elite residential area until it changed in the 1960s with the building of a new motorway and the erection of tall office buildings on the sites of its Molesworth Street retail and service businesses.

[3] Ngāti Mutunga from Taranaki established the fortified village, Pipitea Pā, in 1824 on the Haukawakawa flats.

Then the Ngāti Mutunga left on the sailing ship Rodney in 1835 settling in the Chatham Islands and Te Āti Awa occupied the pā.

[3] A mural Kaiota was painted in 2023 on Bowen Street referencing Māori cultivations of the area of the homesteads Pakuo Pā and Raurimu Kainga.

Haukawakawa / Thorndon flats became a significant part of Port Nicholson's first organised European settlement in 1840.

[note 1] European settlers built their houses alongside the Maori settlement of Pipitea and the New Zealand Company named all the flats Thorndon after the estate of W H F Petre one of their directors.

[9] Thorndon occupies the northern end of the narrow coastal plain that makes up the heart of Wellington.

[13] It incorporates a paved area, seating, planted garden beds, a carved gate and memorial plaques.

It was created in the late 1960s when the urban motorway was built and incorporates the Lady McKenzie Garden for the Blind.

The fair has many stalls selling crafts and second-hand goods and is held for the benefit of Thorndon School.

Built at the end of the 1880s on the reclamation of the Manawatu Railway Company and intended to be a place of fashionable display it did not survive the first World War.

[25] Its coprosmas and "gallant pohutukawas" never grew larger seeming to lack any care from the City Council but the wind and the poor soil and the grimy railway yard discouraged plants and visitors.

[26] The salt water baths were closed in 1920 and the superstructure moved to Evans Bay for dressing sheds.