The former Northern Hotel, sitting amidst modern engineering works, has had a chequered history. The Hotel’s predecessor, the first Northern Hotel built for Andrew Baker in 1860, was the first hotel in Oamaru. It was a timber building which accommodated thirty guests and had three bars which catered for locals, guests, as well as the more colourful people associated with the port. The first meeting of the Oamaru Town Board was held in the Northern Hotel in March 1863. The red letter day for the building was Governor Grey’s two night stay in February 1867. The first railway station in Oamaru was opened across the road from the Northern in 1873. After a couple of further ownership changes in the 1870s George Amos bought the hotel in 1879.

By 1879 there were seventeen hotels in Oamaru, their ornate Victorian facades vying for attention. Amos joined the rivalry, engaging architects Thomas Forrester and John Lemon to draw up plans for a new building. Forrester and Lemon, who had earlier designed the Commercial and the Criterion Hotels in Oamaru, continued the popular Italianate style with paired pilasters flanking three sets of arched windows on the ground floor, and three sets of four-semi-circular windows on the first floor. The double entrance doors were placed at an angle on the street corner. The stone mason was John McCombe and the carpenter John Somerville.

In 1883 Amos sold the Hotel to Lewis Morton. Morton in turn sold to Thomas Proctor (formerly a proprietor of the Royal Hotel in Tees Street). Along with the growing town came an increasingly vocal campaign for prohibition led by the North Otago Prohibition Association. In 1894 four Oamaru hotels lost their licenses, including the Northern. The Northern Hotel transformed into the Northern Temperance Boarding House run first by Mrs Pocklington and later by Mrs Landels. Mr Landels ran the Northern stables next door.

Further changes followed when the Oamaru Railway Station was moved to Humber Street, closer to Thames Street, now the main highway through the town. Guests found the hotels on Thames Street more convenient and could still imbibe, at least until 1906 when Oamaru went dry. The property had a succession of women owners, and traded under a number of names, into the 1940s, after which it was sold to Taylor’s Lime Company. From the late 1940s it was owned by Gordon and Helen McCrone and in 1960, sold to Gillies Foundry Ltd. Gillies sold the property in 2006.

In more recent times, parts of the largely unoccupied building have been open to the public during Oamaru’s Victorian Heritage celebrations, with visitors admiring its striking staircase, stained glass windows, old wallpaper and elaborate ceilings. It has also housed a photography exhibition. In 2012 the Northern Hotel (Former) on the street corner, is surrounded by foundry and engineering works, looking across to the now quiet Oamaru Harbour.