Source: Auckland Council
April’s midtown street party on Thursday 17 April is packed full of art, music, food, live painting and stories. It will also celebrate street culture now, and from decades past.
Midtown’s monthly street parties are enabled by Auckland Council to build vibrancy and support local businesses in the newly-emerging neighbourhood around Te Waihorotiu Station, with funds from the city centre targeted rate.
But there’s a unique, exciting and mysterious layer added to April’s party line-up.
On the way to or from the street party on 17 April, Aucklanders are encouraged to stroll to Durham Lane West and Airedale Street to witness street art they might never have noticed before.
Auckland Council Head of City Centre Programmes Jenny Larking is thrilled to be throwing light on a hidden collection of art history in these little-known locations.
“Standing in one single spot it’s possible to take in the city’s oldest existing piece of graffiti culture, a mid-1990s view of place, and a contemporary portrayal of what our feet stand on beneath the central city.
“Some of these artworks are a celebration of Te Waihorotiu stream, which flows underground, a treasured stream that’s also honoured in the name of the new station taking shape in the area,” she says.
Etched into the walls of our city, street culture never grows old. Here’s more about this unique urban experience:
Durham Lane West
Lane Change by John Radford 1995 – in Durham Lane West.
Artist John Radford’s Lane Change, on the wall of an underpass off Durham Lane West, remembers a slice of Auckland’s history. The artwork cements a replica façade of an 1880s building, which was in Shortland Street, into the wall.
Directly opposite Lane Change is a John Radford mural ‘…that was then, and that was then…’ completed in 1994 in this backstreet shrine to street culture.
This artwork also explores themes of buildings past. Both artworks were funded from a donation by a property development company responsible for a large development in the area at the time, part of Auckland City Council’s incentive scheme for the creation of public art and public spaces by private companies.
In ‘…that was then, and that was then…’ words and phrases overlap and intersect to represent the passage of time. The words draw from Auckland’s history and include the names of Māori pā sites, natural features, and local businesses that have been built over and around in the landscape of Tāmaki Makaurau.
In 2010 an unknown contractor inadvertently painted over the mural. The artist, John Radford, restored the work leaving some of the grey paint to add to the evolution and meaning of the artwork.
“I think it adds to the look of the work. There are now more traces of layers on the wall,” the artist told The Aucklander at the time.
Queen Street City Beat 1986 by Opto & Dick Clique (Otis and Dick Frizzell).
Walk further into the underpass and discover the Queen Street City Beat mural created in 1986 by Opto & Dick Clique (Otis and Dick Frizzell).
In 1986, 15-year-old Otis Frizzell recruited his well-known artist father as free labour to help him with this historic graffiti mural painted in the alleyway. Otis recalls the council of the time wanted to brighten up the inner city and he was commissioned to create the mural.
The only real graffiti art reference available at the time was the movie Beat Street, so the artist wrote QUEEN STREET CITY BEAT. The mural depicts a characterisation of Queen Street at the time featuring recognisable buildings – the Classic Cinema, Auckland Town Hall, Keans Jeans, the neon cowboy and McDonalds.
Otis Frizzell says: “I’m stoked to get a chance to breathe some new life into this old mural. Of course when I painted this with my Dad back in ’86 I had no idea it would last so long, and eventually become one of the oldest existing Street Art pieces in Aotearoa.”
Opposite the Frizzell work is Holly Mafaufau’s Tāmaki Makaurau completed in 2024.
Holly enjoys the conceptual, problem-solving aspect of design and takes a similar approach to the walls she paints. She says that words are weapons, and public walls are an opportunity to speak to people.
“This artwork acknowledges the historic bodies of water of the area and their importance in the provision of kai (food). It was created with the intention to soften a hard urban space while contributing to the collection of existing artworks in this space,” Holly says.
Airedale Street
Artist Poi Ngawati.
Exciting new artworks curated by Ross Liew for Auckland Council have transformed the Airedale Street steps, a popular pathway between Auckland University of Technology and Queen Street.
A mural has been created by artist Poi Ngawati (Waikato Tainui, Ngāti Patupo, Ngāti Whawhaki, Ngāti Mahuta, Ngāpuhi, Ngāti Hine).
Titled Te Huinga Tai – The gathering of tides, this vibrant piece of street art talks about the meeting of tides from all around the world. Depicted via a modern Māori stylised pūhoro design, the work reflects five key values; people first, pursue excellence, embrace change, act with integrity and serve our world.
The north facing walls are painted in shades of violet purple and the south facing walls shades of teal. This colour combination speaks of day and night, light and dark, and how the waters of Te Waihorotiu continue to flow beneath the streets.
Accompanying the mural is a new collaborative light work suspended in the tree above, created by Poi Ngawati and Angus Muir to complete the transformation of this space. The design speaks to the connection between the stars, ocean, and iwi guiding our journeys and shaping our stories.
The flowing forms represent rain, linking Ranginui and Papatūānuku. By day, it moves with the environment; by night, it connects to the stars above.
Read about the full midtown street party programme at OurAuckland.
