Also known as: —
Location: 90 Ilam Road, Ilam, Christchurch 8041
Current status: Running
Active: 1974–present
Website: haereroa.org.nz
History
The Foundry takes its name from the student bar tradition at the University of Canterbury’s Ilam campus, where the Canterbury University Students’ Association (UCSA) has operated live music and social spaces since the late 1960s. The original student union building on Ilam Road — designed by the celebrated New Zealand architecture practice Warren and Mahoney — opened in stages from 1967 and was extended in 1974. That building housed a cluster of student bars under various names over the years, including Cloud Nine, Bentleys Bar, and The Shilling Club, giving generations of Canterbury students their first experience of live music in an informal, affordable setting.
The UCSA building was also home to RDU 98.5FM, Christchurch’s independent student radio station, which first broadcast from the student union building on 23 February 1976 under the name Radio U. Though RDU’s studios were separate from The Foundry bar and gig space, the two were closely connected — the station’s alternative music programming was a natural companion to the live music and DJ nights at the venue, and orientation week events in particular created a direct working relationship between the station and The Foundry. RDU remained in the UCSA building for 35 years, until the 2010 earthquake forced it out alongside The Foundry. The station broadcast for several years from a converted horse truck — the RDUnit — before finding permanent premises in the central city in 2015.
The 4 September 2010 earthquake — a 7.1 magnitude event centred near Darfield — brought that era to an abrupt end. The Ilam Union building sustained serious earthquake damage and was closed permanently in the aftermath. Like so many Christchurch institutions, UCSA faced the challenge of continuing to serve its student community from a city whose infrastructure had been fundamentally disrupted. The solution the association arrived at was pragmatic, even improvised, but it ended up defining a generation of Canterbury student culture: a purpose-built temporary structure, erected in the Ilam Road carpark, that opened approximately April 2011 and became the new home of The Foundry.
The temporary Foundry was modest by any measure — 151 square metres of floor space, with a capacity of around 100 seated or 300 standing. But what it lacked in size it made up for in atmosphere and an improbable booking record. Over the following eight years, the carpark venue hosted an extraordinary cross-section of national and international acts. New Zealand hip-hop heavyweight Savage played The Foundry in 2012 and, in a moment of genuine folklore, broke the floor during his set. American rapper T-Pain performed there, as did Machine Gun Kelly and the Oakland metal veterans Machine Head. Punk legends Dead Kennedys played the small stage, joined over the years by British post-rock outfit James, New Zealand hard rock stalwarts Blindspott, Australian folk musician Xavier Rudd, and fellow Australians Hilltop Hoods — one of the country’s biggest hip-hop acts. Irish punk band Stiff Little Fingers, indie-pop acts Lime Cordiale and Bootleg Rascal, Christchurch metal act Devilskin, and local favourites Hot Donnas and Dolphin Friendly all added their names to the booking history of what was, technically, a temporary carpark shed.
Alongside the ticketed shows, The Foundry became the home of MONO Nights — a weekly Thursday gig series that ran for approximately seven years from around 2016 through to June 2023. Entry was free for Canterbury University students, and the series operated as a genuine grassroots music incubator, giving local and emerging acts a reliable, low-barrier platform during the city’s long post-earthquake rebuild. MONO Nights became a fixture of the Christchurch student music scene, and when it eventually wound up, a new series called Grassroots stepped in to continue the tradition of accessible live music for the university community. In the meantime, the old UCSA building that had originally housed The Foundry’s predecessor bars was demolished in 2016, clearing the way for a permanent replacement to be planned and built.
That replacement was Haere-roa, which opened on 2 August 2019. The $27 million building was designed by Architectus New Zealand and its name — meaning “long journey” in te reo Māori — was gifted by Ngāi Tūāhuriri, the local hapū of Ngāi Tahu whose rohe encompasses the Ilam campus. The building incorporates The Foundry bar and gig space, Bentleys bar, and the Ngaio Marsh Theatre, which seats 300 in cocktail configuration or holds 1,000 standing. The Foundry’s move into Haere-roa gave the venue proper infrastructure for the first time, without losing the identity it had built in the carpark years. Savage returned in 2019 to close out the old temporary venue before the move — a fitting bookend to a run that had begun with him literally breaking the floor seven years earlier.
As for the carpark structure itself: rather than being scrapped, it was dismantled and relocated to Burwood, where it was repurposed as All Saints Anglican Church, which opened in May 2025. The temporary building that had hosted Dead Kennedys and Machine Head found a second life as a place of worship on the city’s eastern fringe — a piece of post-earthquake Christchurch reinvention that feels entirely characteristic of the era. The Foundry, meanwhile, continues to operate inside Haere-roa. In October 2025, a crowd crush event at the venue resulted in injuries, prompting UCSA to introduce ticketed entry for Foundry events from 2026 — a change that marks yet another chapter in the long and eventful life of Canterbury’s most storied student music venue.
In 2012 he broke the floor, then in 2019 he closed the old Foundry.
UCSA, on Savage’s two Foundry appearances
Ilam, Christchurch 8041, New Zealand
Links
- Haere-roa Official Website
- RDU: a history — AudioCulture