Napier, New Zealand – Wednesday, 19 March 2025
When planning our New Zealand travels, Napier was high on the list – especially after missing it on our previous trip due to Covid restrictions. What makes this city particularly fascinating for me is its remarkable architectural story, born from a terrible (and probably terrifying) event.
On 3 February 1931, Napier experienced a catastrophic 7.8 magnitude earthquake that lasted just 2.5 minutes but completely transformed the city. The earthquake tragically killed 256 people and almost totally destroyed the city centre, as well as causing severe damage to residential areas and the surrounding countryside.
By 1933, Napier had completely reinvented itself as an art deco city. Embracing current design trends, with a local flavour, the city was rebuilt from the ground up. Remarkably, much of that 1930s rebuild remains behind and walking through the city centre today feels like stepping into a perfectly preserved 1930s film set.
With over 140 well preserved art deco buildings, the city now markets itself as the “Art Deco Capital of the World.” I would love to visit when they properly celebrate this and ban all those pesky modern cars that park in front of all the interesting bits.
We arrived in Napier after a 5 hour drive from Rotorua, and with only an afternoon in town we were out looking at buildings soon after dropping our bags in the motel, which was directly over the road from the beach. It’s always relaxing being near the sea.
We loved Napier, and I wish we’d had more time to just walk around the city centre and admire the beautifully maintained buildings under a nice blue sky. There is a (mostly) friendly vibe here.
I took a lot of photos as we walked.
It’s a small city centre and with little time we focused on the central streets. There are a couple of locations away from the business and commercial centre, though we didn’t really have time to visit them. I would have liked to have seen some of the residential properties. I’ve saved those for next time.
Late afternoon we stopped for a drink and a sit down at Community Burgers, a really nice little bar that I would’ve been very content spending more time in if I hadn’t had a burger for dinner last night. A rare bar playing decent music.
Walking back to the motel for a break before convening again for dinner, we had the only unpleasant moment of the entire trip. We got engaged in a random conversation with an oldish man, who stopped us on the street. He was clearly drunk or on something, and it started off being just a bit weird but moved on to him making an extremely racist comment, at which point we left the conversation. This resulted in him telling us to ‘F off’ and us returning the compliment, before heading off in different directions.
Luckily, we only let it ruin our day for a few minutes, and after a planned rest, we walked to the beautiful Masonic Hotel for a very nice dinner and a settling glass of wine, or three.
Where is Phil now? 
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