Also known as: City Hotel (predecessor establishment)
Location: 527 Colombo Street, Christchurch City Centre
Current Status: Running — operating as hotel, backpackers, pub, and music venue
Active as a live music venue: 2013 – present
History
The roots of the New City Hotel reach back to 1864, when J. G. Ruddenklau established a hotel at the intersection of High and Colombo Streets known as the City Hotel. That licence — one of Christchurch’s earliest — has been in continuous operation ever since, giving the New City Hotel a direct connection to the city’s founding-era hospitality culture spanning more than 160 years.
The current building dates from 1930. In July 1929, Ballin Brothers — a prominent Christchurch brewing and soft drink concern with strong ties to the city’s Canterbury Jewish business community — purchased the City Hotel licence with the intention of transferring it to a purpose-built premises. They selected John Steele Guthrie as architect, an experienced Christchurch designer heavily influenced by American architectural trends who had helped introduce the Californian Bungalow and Colonial Georgian Revival styles to the city. For the New City Hotel, Guthrie designed in the Moderne idiom: an Art Deco variant characterised by rounded corners, unadorned planar facades, a strong horizontal orientation, and large steel casement windows. The building may have been the first significant example of Moderne architecture in Christchurch.
Construction was carried out by F. Williamson, and the hotel opened on 27 December 1930 under the proprietorship of Walter James Blake, who had previously held the licence for the original City Hotel. A period advertisement described it as “thoroughly up-to-date, [with] hot and cold water in every bedroom.” Notably, it was constructed entirely from locally-sourced materials — reportedly a New Zealand first. The reinforced concrete structure that resulted proved unexpectedly significant eight decades later when the 2010–2011 Canterbury earthquakes devastated the surrounding city centre. Where many of Christchurch’s heritage buildings did not survive, the New City Hotel did — its concrete construction giving it a resilience that earned it restoration funding from the Canterbury Earthquake Heritage Buildings Fund.
The Ballin family retained ownership until 1958, when the building transferred to a new company formed jointly with the Friedlander family, another prominent Canterbury Jewish business family. That company held it until 1985. The ground floor underwent refurbishment in the early 1990s as part of a bar renovation, modifying the northern façade. In 2019, property firm Box 112 purchased the building, retaining the ground-floor bar and converting the upper floors into boutique backpacker accommodation.
Through the post-earthquake rebuild years, the New City Hotel found itself in a peculiar position: one of the only functioning traditional pubs left in the Christchurch CBD as the surrounding blocks were cleared and slowly rebuilt. It became a touchstone for the city’s ongoing music and hospitality culture, hosting live bands, karaoke nights, battle-of-the-bands competitions, and comedy shows. Christchurch acts including Soaked Oats and Fire for Glory have appeared on its stage. The courtyard — mentioned in reminiscences alongside nearby brewery venue Cassels Blue Smoke — became part of the texture of the city’s post-earthquake social life.
Heritage New Zealand has listed the building as a Category 2 Historic Place, recognising its architectural significance as one of very few remaining examples of Moderne design in the city, its technological significance as a survivor of the earthquakes, and its social significance as the last traditional hotel operating within the four avenues. The hotel’s original staircase, timber panelling, and room service buttons survive in the interior.
Friends in bands reminisce about nights at the New City Hotel, smoking in the courtyard beside Cassels Blue Smoke.
Hannah Powell, Rolling Stone Australia, 2024