Also known as: Coker’s Commercial Rooms, Warner’s Hotel
Location: 50 Cathedral Square, Christchurch City Centre
Current status: Demolished
Active: 1863–2011 (as a music venue: c. 1980s–2010)
History
Few buildings in Christchurch matched the longevity or layered history of Warners Hotel at 50 Cathedral Square. The site’s story begins in 1863, when John Etherden Coker — a former Inspector of Public Nuisances for Christchurch City — opened his Commercial and Dining Rooms on Town Section 702, at the northeast corner of Cathedral Square. William Francis Warner, a former sea captain who had earned a measure of celebrity for saving a passenger’s life during an 1861 voyage on the brig Reah Sylvia, purchased the establishment in the mid-1870s and lent it his name. Warner was described in the press of his era as “shrewd, business-like, practical, with the readiness of resource which characterises old salts,” and he oversaw decades of expansion before drowning in a boating accident on the Avon Heathcote Estuary in 1896.
By 1891 the hotel had grown to 78 rooms, complete with ladies’ dining and drawing rooms, sample rooms for commercial travellers, and modern bathrooms. Fire destroyed the wooden original on 24 April 1900, gutting the building overnight; a brick replacement was commissioned immediately. On 29 October 1901 a grand new hotel, designed by architect Joseph Maddison in the Victorian Free Classical style, opened its doors with over 120 rooms, cedar-fitted bars with bevelled mirrors, electric reading lamps in each room, and a dining room seating 200 beneath ornamental ceilings. A fourth storey was added in 1910, maintaining the building’s architectural integrity by shifting the entrance pediment up one floor. In 1917, the northern end of the building was demolished to build the Liberty Theatre — seating 1,400 and later renamed the Savoy Theatre — partly as a noise buffer between hotel guests and the adjacent Lyttelton Times printing presses. The Savoy was itself demolished in 1993, and the resulting gap became a popular beer garden.
Heritage New Zealand registered the building as a Category II historic place in April 1997. In 2010 a 14-storey Novotel opened behind a faithful replica of the original 1910 façade. As a live music venue, Warners Hotel found its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, when its bar hosted Thursday-night gigs that became a fixture of the Christchurch music scene. Documented performances include Radiohead (June 1994), The Mutton Birds (May 1994), Dead Moon (February 1996), The Chills (September 1996), Shihad (February, August and November 1996), the 3Ds (August 1996), NoMeansNo (November 1995), Paw (December 1995), and multiple shows by Straitjacket Fits, David Kilgour, Headless Chickens, The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, The Bats, and Bailterspace. The February 2011 Canterbury earthquake caused severe structural damage to the heritage building, and by November 2011 the historic portion had been demolished. The Novotel reopened in August 2013 after its own earthquake repairs.
Gigs at this point (mainly at Warners in Cathedral Square on a Thursday night, although the Dux de Lux was also a mainstay as well) often saw large crowds, with Warners sometimes attracting 800 people.
Christchurch City Libraries, Christchurch Music Timeline