The former Sydenham Fire Station at 293 Colombo Street had two lives as a music venue: Wayne Manor from 1979, hosting Christchurch’s early punk and post-punk scene in a BYO cavernous station space, and The Firehouse Nightclub from 1985 — a more polished club that survived a bomb attack and a gunman before ironically being destroyed by fire around 1990.
The building at 124 Worcester Street was designed by Benjamin Woolfield Mountfort and opened in 1875 as Trinity Congregational Church, whose congregation included suffragist Kate Sheppard. Converted to the State Trinity Centre in 1975 — a theatre, bar and restaurant — it hosted The Axemen’s landmark recording session for Three Virgins before earthquake damage in 2011 closed it for over a decade. It reopened in 2023 as The Church Brew Pub, retaining Mountfort’s famous double barrel vault ceiling.