The summary below is from the Upgrade report for Commercial Buildings, completed in 2012.

Constructed in the later 1860s as retail premises, these two buildings have been combined to house the Easy Made Marmalade company, and are among the early commercial premises built on Tyne Street, the centre of Oamaru’s commerce in the 1860s.

Grain and wool production on the pastoral estates boosted the development of Oamaru as a port town. The early 1870s saw the town transformed from an ‘insignificant collection of stone and wooden buildings’ along the west side of Tyne Street to an ebullient show of Victorian architecture. Architect Thomas Glass appears to have designed the building on the right which originally comprised two separate shops. One was occupied by the Bank of Otago and then by Glass himself, with the other built for Robert Lang Livingston, a bookseller and stationer. The first occupant of the building on the left appears to have been wine and general merchant James Finch and Co.

Architecturally these two small buildings represent the early stirrings of Oamaru’s commercial heart. They are among the first generation of stone buildings marking the move from the temporary timber and iron buildings of the early 1860s. Their scale is modest, though both were carefully detailed. Some of this detail has been lost however. Their survival tells the story of Oamaru before the prosperity and grand architecture of the 1870s.

The stories of the changing tenancies of the buildings are complex – one writer remembered that south of the right of way (which runs between 6 Tyne Street and 1 Itchen Street), the shop ‘changed its tenants as often as the flowers bloom.’ The main occupants of the Finch and Co building were William Bee’s Oamaru Bond (1891-1908), various motor garages, and the North Otago Cool Store and Oamaru Ice Cream Company, in the twentieth century. Livingston’s building had two sailmakers (Anderson and Dimick) as long-standing tenants. The buildings have been occupied by the Easy Made Marmalade Company for some years, and they continue to operate from the premises in 2012.