Life in the quiet lane: what the Waikato Expressway leaves behind

Vicky Bagley can remember when she and her husband would pull up on the street outside their house and reverse the caravan into the section.

That didn’t last.

Back in the day, 43 years ago when Bagley and her husband shifted in, their street was a lot quieter.

The Bagleys’ street is the Great South Road and they live across from the sign welcoming southbound motorists to the town of Huntly. That means until two years ago they were smack on State Highway One, with the river behind them and the railway on the other side of the road.

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Huntly’s population was not that different from today, but Auckland and Hamilton have boomed. “The traffic just got worse and worse and worse,” says Vicky Bagley.

Funny thing is, she recalls that even when they moved in there was talk of a bypass being built. They had to wait 40 years. Four grown-up children later, the bypass lives.

And the Bagleys have a big new caravan, which they can back onto their section again.

So being bypassed two years ago has been pretty good. It’s not quite Cambridge, where the town roared ahead once the highway was rerouted. Nor is it Pōkeno, the first to be cut off by a SH1 expressway bypass back in 1997 and now growing like crazy because of its proximity to Auckland.

But it’s similar. Any fears of what might happen once the supply of out-of-towners dried up have eased.

With the final Hamilton stretch of Waikato expressway set to open, the buzz is all about the new road stretching from south of Cambridge right through to north Waikato, cutting bucketloads of time off the trip north – at least until you hit Auckland. But what’s it like for those left behind?

Back in 1996, the Waikato Times was considering the potential impact of an envisaged new four-lane highway all the way from north of Pōkeno as far as Cambridge. Pōkeno was about to be bypassed; others would follow.

“The embryonic stretch of SH1 has received a mixed reception – cool from owners of Pōkeno’s fast food outlets who stand to lose at least part of their livelihood; warm from motorists who see the motorway extension as a blessed end to a stretch of highway known commonly as ‘death road’,” wrote the paper.

Further south, a Huntly community board member said there was a concern the town would be “out of sight, out of mind” under the proposed route, while conversely a Ngāruawāhia community board member said shifting the highway would improve safety.

The bypass opened in June 1997 and Pōkeno businesses, including the two service stations, struggled. But outside investors came in, proximity to the big smoke helped and Pōkeno has pretty much dusted itself off and never looked back.

Here we are 25 years later, and the four-lane highway has kicked on to also bypass Cambridge.

Friday afternoons were the worst for the Bagleys. “On a Friday afternoon after about 3.30 you sort of thought ‘nah, I don’t really want to go out anywhere’,” says Vicky.

They live about 2km north of the town’s CBD, 3km north of the traffic lights by KFC, and on long weekends the traffic would back up that entire distance.

And then the Huntly section of the expressway was opened, gifting the Great South Road back to locals. Waka Kotahi traffic counts on the main road near the town centre halved from 29,102 in 2019 to 14,926 in 2020, a drop that presumably partly reflects Covid lockdowns.

Mind you, it’s all relative. Trucks thunder past the Bagleys’ house, especially the Gleeson & Cox units, shuttling north from the company’s Riverview Rd quarry.

An out-of-towner might think things are still pretty busy; a local not so much. “We haven’t got the heavy traffic going past like we did have, you know it would shake the house,” Bagley says. And they’re used to the trains. Unless there’s an easterly, they don’t take much notice of them.

Bagley is a coal miner’s daughter and granddaughter from Pukemiro, and her husband worked in the Huntly East mine for about 40 years, until it shut down in 2015.

The closure affected the town, she says. She thinks there are fewer businesses and she’s seeing empty shops. The Base, just 20 minutes away, is part of that, she thinks. “I think it’s like that in most small towns now. The big companies have taken out the little guys, haven’t they?”

Amrit Singh, who owns Fruit King at the north end of Huntly’s town centre, says he is seeing older people from the east side confident to come into town now they don’t have to cross SH1. Singh, who shifted from Auckland four years ago, reckons the real picture for the town will be known once tourism returns to the country. The likes of KFC and McDonald’s would have taken the biggest hit, he says. As for his business, “we are all right”.

Across the main street, LJ Hooker’s Sheryl Hamilton and Michael Cresswell say the expressway is a selling point. Residential sales have slowed recently, as they have everywhere, but before that they say there were a lot of Aucklanders buying investment properties and people are also shifting from Hamilton because of Huntly’s relative affordability.

Huntly ward councillor Shelley Lynch is in no two minds about the impact of the expressway.

“We don’t get that bypass traffic any more, which is brilliant. The businesses don’t seem to have suffered at all.”

She says locals are pleased they can get into the town centre now, and get parking.

If anything, she says the council is starting to get more business inquiries because of the town’s connection to the expressway and its centrality. Sleepyhead shifting into Ohinewai is the headline act, but others are also making approaches, she says.

“You can get to Hamilton, you can get to Tauranga, you can get to Auckland, lickety split.”

She enthuses about a couple who have bought a block of buildings beside the town’s central plaza, intending to put offices with a river view on the top floor and a cafe at ground level.

“People are flocking to the Waikato area because we’re just so central and convenient,” she says. “Have a drive around Ngāruawāhia – holy mother, the new houses that are going up!”

Lynch later gets back in touch to say the closing of local banks has caused more hardship to the town than anything else.

In 2003 and 2004, Waikato University economics professor Frank Scrimgeour did two studies into the extension of the Auckland motorway – both north into the Hibiscus Coast and south.

Some places seem to gain and some seem to wither, he says, and they can be quite close together so it’s not easy to work out what’s going on. But he’s broadly optimistic about the prospects for the smaller centres.

One of the questions, given how much easier it is for people to travel out of town, is whether there is anything to anchor people to smaller communities.

“In some senses, what the expressway does is it sucks people into the likes of Hamilton for work and shopping and things like that.”

But because Hamilton hasn’t been able to build enough affordable housing, the expressway gives people the chance to live further away and commute. Covid amplifies that. He cites the US. “If you’re only going to spend two days a week or so working in San Francisco, you’re prepared to drive a long way, stay a night, do two days’ work and head back, and you can buy a house at, say, a quarter of the price.” he says.

“I think what we’re going to see is everywhere that has easy access onto an expressway, within an hour of a metropolitan area, we are going to find every spare section that can be built on, will be built on over the next few years. So that generates a certain kind of local business activity.”

He expects to see a diverse range of people moving into smaller centres. That includes criminals. “For some people crime is a career,” Scrimgeour says. “If your life is crime, you don’t want to be particularly visible. So your business area can be, say Auckland, in terms of your criminal activity, but you can slink down the expressway to a place where you’re not so visible.”

There’s a rub, quite apart from the possibility of living next door to a criminal. While smaller centres have economic potential, to make the most of it they need to make sure they are attractive places for people to live in, not just commute from.

That’s partly about having the hospitality and services the locals want, though Scrimgeour warns against “over investing” in town centres, which are not going to be used in the same way as they once were.

Also of value is having something that attracts out-of-towners to stop. “If we think about the North Waikato, it seems to me there’s lots of opportunities, which I would think that iwi, in particular, will ultimately take the lead on.”

There’s a further rub. Waikato University’s Moana Rarere, who is project lead of Thriving Regions North (He Pā Harakeke), says her group is engaging with mana whenua in Pōkeno. She says their research has uncovered that despite all the transformation there are groups that have been largely invisible and have missed out.

Her project is working with mana whenua to develop a community marae in the town, and aims to help give those locals the tools and resources to make their voice heard. “Relationship building is going to be a big part of that.”

Vicky Bagley says she’s looking forward to the Hamilton expressway opening because at the moment if she and her husband are heading to Cambridge or further south, they take SH1B through Gordonton. “That road’s a bit shocking.” You notice these things when you’re towing a caravan.

The Gordonton locals very much notice the road as well. Waka Kotahi figures show increasing traffic flows from 2016, although there was a slight decline in 2020, presumably because of Covid. The annual average daily traffic over those five years was 3897, 10.5% of which were heavy vehicles. So it’s not quite Huntly levels, but it’s plenty.

And they’re not all sticking to the speed limit, notes The Mandarin Tree art gallery owner Claudia Aalderink. She’s looking forward to a reduction in heavy trucks when the Hamilton bypass opens. With luck one morning ritual will disappear with them. The peat ground makes the road bumpy and each morning she does the rounds straightening the paintings.

But Gordonton is buzzing, she says. “There’s so many really nice shops, and there’s so much to do, there’s cafes, there’s something for everyone.”

If that has been driven by through traffic coming from Auckland, what will happen when some divert to the Hamilton bypass?

Aalderink is unconcerned. With heavy vehicles out of the way, Gordonton as a destination spot could gain. She’s had the gallery almost eight years and says people know where she is.

The jury is out for Carmen Ko, owner of the nearby Firepot Cafe. Ko bought the business five years ago, and says she employs four fulltimers, all local. She’s expecting the Hamilton bypass opening to have an impact, with up to half of her business coming from people driving through, particularly Aucklanders heading towards Cambridge.

Across the road, mother and daughter Cilla and Carol Henry are looking forward to reduced traffic noise and a safer community, Carol says, both for those of her mother’s generation and for the township’s children.

Cilla was born here and can remember when it was a gravel road. She can also remember the dairy factory in the settlement, where her father worked. “Changes, eh,” Cilla says. “You have to go with the change. The memory is always there of how this place was.”

There is deeper history as well, with generations of the family having attended school here. Cilla and Carol are Ngāti Wairere, and the expressway passes through their ancestral lands.

Carol sees Gordonton having an opportunity to exercise some control over its future, rather than just becoming a suburb of Hamilton. “I do not welcome that day at all. So if we can do anything collectively to stop that, hey, I’m all for that.”

It’s as though the settlement were listening to Scrimgeour, or possibly taking notes from the Cambridge experience.

In Ohinewai north of Huntly, Meynell Dugdale is back from a morning walk along a quiet country road. It’s wider than your average country road because it used to be SH1. Traffic once poured past. There was a petrol station, a garden centre, and a Four Square, all fed by the constant flow.

But now Dugdale virtually has Ohinewai South Road to himself. He and his wife Joy have lived here all their adult lives; Joy was born here. So they’ve seen some changes. Like the Four Square – the first rural one in Waikato, Joy says, opened by her parents back in 1963. Some years later, it became the Cowboys restaurant.

The settlement was bypassed in 2003, with the opening of the Ohinewai-Rangiriri section of the Waikato expressway. That took its toll on business. Cowboys is awaiting its next incarnation. The garden centre has also gone. A plumber has set up there, and the former petrol station is now an engineering centre.

But there’s a lot going on, despite the quietness of this rural setting beside the wide, slow Waikato River. Cabin builder Compac Homes has set up, and there’s a well-established LPG business. There is also the strong likelihood that housing will soon be blooming around here. And the school is still thriving just as it did when Joy was a youngster.

This has been, Meynelle says, the best of places.

It’s an hour to Auckland, an hour to the east coast, an hour to Raglan and half an hour to Hamilton, Joy says. “It’s just so central. Which is why I figure Sleepyhead want to be where they are.”

Meynelle is concerned at the change the Sleepyhead factory will bring.

“For me it’s the best of places because it’s home, it’s a sanctuary,” he says. “It’s quieter. And that’s why we enjoy living here. It’s different to Huntly, and I always feel that that’s the main reason why people have come to live here – to get away from all that.”

What are the chances? A door knock of three properties in Huntly chosen for their proximity to the former SH1 reveals exactly the changes everyone has been talking about.

The Bagleys’ house is just up the road from the cafe and souvenir store that used to pump with coachloads of tourists pulling in. Now those two businesses are closed, and tagging is creeping over their facades like encroaching jungle. Also closed is a fruit and vege store further north, past the cemetery. But it may be Covid, rather than the expressway, that has put paid to them.

In any case, the town’s population has been growing. It was up 15% in the five years from 2013 to 2018, according to Census data, from 6849 to 7905. It’s not completely a sidenote to say that in the same period Pōkeno went ballistic, growing from a population of 600 to 2517.

So there are plenty of new people in Huntly, some commuting long distances for work, including to Auckland. One family of such newcomers live next door to the Bagleys. The Tohi family bought in January and shifted from Auckland where the price of housing was out of their reach. Now Ilaisaane commutes daily to Auckland, while her husband Makanoti works even further afield as a marine engineer on the ships in Wellington, two weeks on, two weeks off. Their children are mostly based in Auckland, though their eldest son, Malakai, is down for a few days.

They’re settling in to the new house, and Makanoti says they get on well with their neighbours.

“It’s quiet,” Makanoti says. “Very quiet,” Malakai says.

On the other side of them, long-time resident David Nairn commutes to work in the other direction, to Hamilton.

He’s worked out it’s five minutes quicker to get into Hamilton if he scoots north and takes the on-ramp south at Ohinewai, but it’s 25 kilometres further. So he’s only driven the Huntly expressway section a couple of times “just to be nosy”. But the reduced traffic has made a difference even taking the old route; it takes about 20 minutes to get to The Base, he says.

He hasn’t noticed much change in Huntly itself. “There’s been a few shops that have closed but whether that’s just because of the local economy or whatever, I don’t know.” Maybe it’s just the tough economic times. You don’t get as much for your money as you used to, he notes.

As for the street noise, well, he sits out on his front verandah with a cuppa making the most of the sun every morning, so he’s not really noticing it. The train, maybe, especially the coal train. “You sort of feel that one.”

Meet the new Huntly. Quite a lot like the old Huntly. But quieter.