Situated on the waterfront in central Auckland since the early 1900s, the Public Shelters have formed an important aspect in the provision of public access to the city harbour for more than a century. Consisting of two buildings of ornate Arts and Crafts design, they were originally erected in 1915 to provide shelter for owners and passengers of the many small launches that sailed around the Hauraki Gulf in the early twentieth century. Their value to Aucklanders was confirmed when they were relocated a short distance to their current positions in 1922-3 for the same use. In both their initial and secondary locations, they are associated with widespread improvements to the city waterfront undertaken in 1903-24 to the designs of W.H. Hamer, Chief Engineer of the Auckland Harbour Board. They remain important components of a wider historic landscape linked with Auckland’s evolution as a notable national and international port.

The Public Shelters are situated in an area known to Māori as One-Panea, part of the wider Waitematā harbour. The Waitematā forms the ancestral waters of numerous iwi including Ngāti Whātua Ōrakei, with many kāinga and pā occupying its shoreline and headlands. One-Panea was a source of kaimoana, and also used for the arrival and departure of waka. After Auckland was established as a colonial city in 1840, the area - renamed Commercial Bay - became the main landing site for settlers and goods, including produce brought from afield by Māori. Under the Auckland Harbour Board (AHB), established in 1871, successive reclamations improved port facilities as the town’s economy developed. By the end of the century, Auckland was one of New Zealand’s busiest ports. In the early 1900s, a growing fleet of small private launches operating in the Hauraki Gulf used waterfront steps and landings for arrival and departure, often illegally. From 1903, the AHB employed notable engineer, W.H. Hamer (1869-1940) to improve and expand the port facilities through major works. In 1915, his Quay Street West extension scheme to the west of Queen’s Wharf (1907-13) sought to regularise launch operations by creating purpose-built launch landings and associated public shelters in association with reclamation and a new harbour wall.

Hamer’s scheme established five multi-level, reinforced-concrete launch landings close to the intersection of Beatty and Quay Streets. Two public shelters of handsome appearance were added overlooking the landings in late 1915.

Of identical design, each contained two open waiting rooms with large multi-pane windows offering views in all directions. Externally, the structures had a brick base, lath and plaster walls with applied half-timbering details, and a hipped Marseilles tile roof topped by a decorative roof rotunda. In their Arts and Crafts-influenced style, they can be seen to have embodied aspects of ‘Englishness’ at a time when New Zealand troops were fighting for the British Empire during the First World War (1914-18). Newspapers lauded both the shelters and landings for their design and as a public amenity.

Less than a decade later, plans for further port expansion necessitated relocation of the launch landings and shelters to a new harbourfront a short distance to the north. The structures were moved by crane, with one shelter being repositioned immediately west of the landmark Ferry Building (built 1909-12) in mid-1922, and the other on a jettied platform connected to the under-construction Princes Wharf in early 1923. They were respectively placed beside harbour steps to the water and three of the similarly relocated launch landings. The latter were subsequently reserved for licensed, commercial launches, which remained popular in competition with larger ferries and commercial shipping businesses through the early decades of the twentieth century.

The shelters remained in use for much of the remaining century as public spaces with interior seating. By the 1980s, external glass doors had been added to both structures. At this time, the eastern shelter was converted into a food kiosk, involving some internal alteration. In 1998, it was further converted into a ticket kiosk and returned to use as a passenger waiting area, specifically for ferry passengers. Both shelters were incorporated in a wider redevelopment of the waterfront space for public use in 2021-2. In 2023 the western shelter was repurposed as a cultural and marine education space by Ngāti Whātua Ōrākei. Both shelters, along with their associated launch landings and harbour steps, remain notable parts of a wider historic area linked with Auckland’s maritime development, which also includes the nearby Ferry Building, Queen’s Wharf and First World War Memorial Beacon - all similarly of early twentieth-century date.