DESCRIPTION:
The Auckland Harbour Board workshops (completed in 1944) provided modern centralised accommodation for staff which had previously maintained the port's property, plant and equipment from temporary and scattered premises.

The design was formally approved by the Board in July of 1938. It had been decided as early as 1927 to remove the Board's workshops and stores in Hobson Street to a less valuable but more accessible site on the eastern reclamation within the viaduct basin. Breastwork and reclamations undertaken between February and June 1938 provided the building site.

Tenders called for the work closed on January 30, 1940. The contract was awarded to Fletcher Construction Ltd. Shortages of skilled labour and supplies of imported materials, brought about by the Second World War, seriously delayed progress. By February 1942 the northern portion of the workshops and stores building was complete. The Commissioner of Defence Construction suspended the contract in May 1942, however, when only the floors and lower portions of the external walls had been constructed on the building's southern portion. Work resumed in March 1943 and the building was completed a year later.

Dredges, tugs, launches, cranes and all types of cargo handling plant were surveyed, overhauled, and repaired at the premises. Separate workshops were provided for the different trades. Based here also was the stores branch which had responsibility for the purchase and supply of materials and tools necessary for various works. Although the principal duties of the workshops were maintenance and repairs, a considerable amount of new work was also carried out. The machine shop was able to deal with most work except foundry work, and even in this it did its own pattern making for castings to be made by other firms. In the blacksmiths' and boilermakers' shop all classes of structural steelwork were carried out. A workshop was later built at the slipway at Beaumont Street to accommodate shipwrights and slipway workers. The modern demands of containerisation in shipping associated heavy equipment also eventually necessitated the provision of facilities elsewhere. However, the workshops continued to serve the purpose for which they were built until late in 1989. Since that time they have provided predominantly studio space for a variety of designers involved in the visual arts and media. The workshops were an exciting performance venue for Inside Out Theatre's production of Thomas Mann's The Holy Sinner in October 1990.