Bucklands Beach - Facilities

Facilities

Bucklands Beach has a number of dispersed shops and facilities. There is a restaurant/dairy and a pizza shop at Eastern Beach. A real estate office, dairy, and two restaurants are located at Big Bucklands Beach. At Mobil Corner are a wine shop, a bakery, a take-aways and a dairy. Also there is an old scout hall at the base of Devon Road. Opposite this is an outdoor bowling club. On Wharf Road is a community centre hall and Plunket rooms. This was built in 1965 on the site of the old hall/dairy Chez Paris which burnt down after a fire in the cinema projection box.

At Eastern Beach there is a sports ground (Rogers Park)named after Vic Rogers, a long serving local member of the former Manakau County Council in the 1950s and 60s, is used for junior soccer and a tennis club and courts. On the rocky area between Big and Little Bucklands Beach is a yacht club rooms for centre board boats, boat ramp and hauling out hard stand which was built in 1962. In 2007 a huge holding tank was constructed under the hard stand to hold the surplus sewage from beach side houses. Eastern Beach has a large Christian Youth camp which hires out its facilities to schools. At one stage the beach had three garages but all have closed now. Until the 1980s Bucklands Beach had its own post office, next to the community centre hall but this was shut down and removed by barge to Waiheke Island. In the 1950s Miss Tonks ran a library from a small building, that had previously been a garage, on the steep frontage of her property at the North end of Bucklands Beach Road near the Community hall. This little building about 4m x 3m, was so frequently crowded with customers they could barely walk around. Midway between the two restaurants at big Bucklands Beach was a dairy and hall complex called Westend (named after the farm at the tip of the peninsula). The hall was used for local dances in the 1930s and 1940s during the summer holidays.

The hall had a dairy at the front and bach style accommodation for the shop keeper. In the 1950s the hall was turned into a full size house attached to the shop. The shop had a tiny post office that was the main PO before the stand alone post office was built just south of Chez Paris. At the Xmas dance Pop Leach, who was the normal MC, would get dressed in a santa's costume and hide in the hall ceiling -descending by ladder to give the children presents. The old Westend building was pulled down in the 1970s. Between the 1950s and the 1970s there was a butcher's shop and a small doctor's rooms about 100 metres north of the intersection of Wharf Rd and Hattaways Ave. Both have been pulled down.