Charles Kettle

Charles Henry Kettle (6 April 1821 – 3 June 1863) surveyed the city of Dunedin in New Zealand, imposing a bold design on a challenging landscape. He was aiming to create a Romantic effect and incidentally produced the world's steepest street, Baldwin Street.

Born in Kent in England, Charles Henry Kettle was the son of Nathaniel Kettle. 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.

Kettle arrived at Port Nicholson, Wellington in 1840. He was a cadet in William Mein Smith's survey corps, and was soon promoted on the strength of his abilities. In 1842, he led an exploration party up the Manawatu River penetrating to the Wairarapa district, helping to stimulate its pastoral development. In 1843, he returned to Britain and became a publicist for the projected New Edinburgh settlement in Otago in New Zealand's South Island. 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 September 1845, he was appointed to head the survey of the new Scottish settlement. He married Amelia Omer at St Peter's Sandwich, Kent, 10 September 1845.

Kettle and his wife reached Otago Harbour in February 1846.

In his Otago surveys, Kettle made the first extensive use in New Zealand of trigonometrical methods and his urban and rural surveys have been described as 'painstaking'. He travelled extensively over the rugged Otago Block, whose daunting contours scarcely warrant a mention in his correspondence. He climbed Mount Maungatua on the Taieri Plain in 1847 and from there saw the interior of Central Otago. He identified the land as suited for pastoralism and correctly saw that as the colony's future economic mainstay. By March 1848, when the first immigrant ships arrived, the surveys' outlines were virtually complete.

Kettle continued working on the project for the next two years but after the demise of the New Zealand Company in 1850, his relations with William Cargill, leader of the Otago settlement, deteriorated, partly because Kettle was English while Cargill was narrowly Scottish. By 1852, Kettle had been made the colonial government's surveyor at Otago, thus resolving some of the tensions. In 1854 he resigned.

He had already made tours of the pastoral districts and had himself taken up some land for sheep runs. By 1860, he was able to sell his pastoral licences and retire to Dunedin. 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. This greatly swelled the population of Dunedin. Many were camped in a place unprepared for such an influx. 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. His principal monument is the city that he surveyed and that many others built.

Kettle's instructions had been to reproduce, so far as possible, the characteristics of Edinburgh in Scotland. (Hocken, 1898, p. 82.) He did not, as it is popularly supposed, simply impose that city's plan on Dunedin's site. He did not take Edinburgh's Old Town as his model, but the New Town, by that time perhaps the most widely admired urban development in Europe. 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.