New Zealand Centennial Exhibition - Location

Location

The exhibition took for its site a location at Rongotai in Wellington, Edmund Anscombe designing the buildings and grounds in the Art Deco style. Construction began on April 27, 1939 by the firm Fletcher and Love Construction Companies and over 1,000 staff were employed in the process of building the exhibition. The exhibition grounds were just over 55 acres (220,000 m2) in size, with the main buildings accounting for around 14 acres (57,000 m2) of this.

Feature structures included:

• the Centennial Tower, the main focus of attention, standing 155 feet (47 m) tall and weighing 700 tons. This icon featured on many of the souvenirs celebrating the exhibition.
• a statue of a Neriad (a sea-woman on a seahorse) standing in the central fountain.
• the New Zealand Railways Department stand featuring a working model-railway constructed to scale and maintained by Frank Roberts (model maker).