Also known as: Wayne Manor
Location: 293 Colombo Street, Sydenham
Current status: Destroyed by fire, c. 1990
Active as a live music venue: 1979–c.1990
History
The building at 293 Colombo Street was constructed as the Sydenham Fire Station in the late 19th century, sometime after Sydenham borough was incorporated in 1876. For decades it served the district as a working fire station, its cavernous interior housing engines and equipment beneath a high ceiling. That same spatial drama — the sheer scale of the old station floor — would later define its character as a music venue.
Its second life began in the late 1970s when it became the unlikely home of Christchurch’s emerging punk and new wave scene. The Strand — a key early punk promoter operating in and around the city alongside venues like The Gluepot and the CPSA — held a farewell all-dayer at the old station, featuring bands including Bon Marche and Dick Driver’s Splash Alley. After that event the venue became known as Wayne Manor, and it quickly established itself as the nerve centre of Christchurch’s post-punk underground.
Every Friday night two or three bands would play while the audience brought their own alcohol, gathering around a stage lit by a single hanging bulb at one end of the cavernous old station, with armchairs and a fireplace at the other.
Description of Wayne Manor, AudioCulture
Wayne Manor operated as a BYO venue at a time when the commercial licensing system made running a conventional pub venue difficult for the underground scene. The atmosphere was deliberately rough-edged and communal: the audience brought their own beer and wine, bands set up at one end of the old station floor under a single hanging bulb, and at the other end the crowd arranged themselves among salvaged armchairs around a fireplace. It was an aesthetic that suited the music — Wayne Manor hosted post-punk bands, poetry happenings, and whatever the loose community of punks and counterculture survivors wanted to put on.
The venue’s end came not from commercial failure but from violence. Members of the neighbouring Sydenham Rugby Club began attacking audience members on a regular basis, and the scene eventually collapsed under the pressure. Wayne Manor closed in the early 1980s. The building sat in a transitional period before it was formally redeveloped — the exact nature of any intermediate use during this time is unconfirmed.
In 1985 the building reopened as The Firehouse Nightclub — a dramatically different proposition from its punk predecessor. Where Wayne Manor had been bare boards and BYO, The Firehouse was a polished commercial nightclub: upholstered horseshoe booths lined the walls, a proper timber dance floor occupied the centre, and a doorman in a bow-tie controlled entry. The name was a deliberate nod to the building’s origins, and the space retained its atmospheric height even as the fitout became considerably more sophisticated. Beneath the main room, a separate late-night bar known as Matches served as an after-hours gathering point.
By the late 1980s The Firehouse had established itself as one of central Christchurch’s busiest nightclubs. The resident band The Avengers were packing the floor regularly by 1989. International acts performed there too, with Mel & Kim among those who played the venue. Local act Big Game Hunters were also part of the Firehouse circuit.
1989 was a violent year for the club. On the night of 2–3 May, police and explosive disposal experts responded to a bomb threat at the venue; two devices were defused and a third was detonated under controlled conditions. The club also survived a separate incident involving a gunman during the same period. That a nightclub could weather both a bombing and a gunman and continue trading speaks to the resilience — or perhaps stubbornness — of the operation.
The irony of the building’s end was not lost on anyone. The former Sydenham Fire Station, which had survived punk violence, a bomb attack, and a gunman, was eventually destroyed by fire around 1990. The exact date of the fire is unconfirmed — sources place it in the early to mid 1990s — but the outcome was the same: the cavernous old station that had housed two very different music scenes was gone. The site was subsequently redeveloped as the Firehouse Centre, a shopping hub that preserved the name if not the building.
Photos courtesy of Canterbury Museum.
Sydenham, Christchurch 8023, New Zealand
Links
- Christchurch 1978–83: Viva Vauxhalls and Other Stories — AudioCulture
- The Fire House Nightclub — Peeling Back History
- Canterbury Museum Collection — Photos of the Firehouse Nightclub