Newmarket
The corner where Remuera Road, Great South Road, and Broadway converge tells you everything about how Newmarket got its name: this was, from 1850, a place where livestock changed hands. The first cattle market opened on a Tuesday in October of that year, beside the Royal George Inn, and the area stuck. Today Broadway is the spine of one of Auckland's densest shopping precincts — Westfield's 200-plus stores, a rooftop dining level, boutiques on Teed and Nuffield streets, and murals on walls that once belonged to breweries.
But the neighbourhood rewards slower attention. Highwic, a Carpenter Gothic house built around 1863, sits behind its gardens as a reminder that this suburb was once home to serious money and serious ambitions. The Olympic Pool — New Zealand's first 50-metre pool, opened in 1940 in clean Art Deco lines — is still there, south of Lumsden Green, which has been a public reserve since 1878.
💛 What travellers fall for
People who keep coming back tend to start on Teed Street rather than Broadway — the cafes are smaller, the pace slower. They'll mention Lumsden Green as a useful orientation point, the triangle where Parnell Road, Broadway, and Khyber Pass meet. And most will tell you to walk past Highwic even if you don't go in, just to see the Gothic Revival fretwork against the sky.
Deals in Newmarket
Book directly at the providerHow Newmarket came to be
The intersection that became Newmarket was subdivided in June 1841, and by the 1850s it had settled into its role as a livestock market — the name 'new market' simply described what happened there. The railway arrived in 1873 after the completion of the first Parnell Tunnel, and railway workshops operated nearby from 1884 to 1928. Newmarket ran as an independent borough from 1885 until its abolition in 1989, long enough to give it a distinct civic identity: the Borough Council renamed the main street Broadway in late 1912, partly to signal that the muddy track it had been was behind it.
By the 1960s Broadway carried the largest concentration of neon signs in the country, and the suburb's industrial character — breweries had operated here since the 1840s — gradually gave way to retail as factories followed the Southern Motorway south. The bones of earlier ambition remain: the 1940 Olympic Pool, Lumsden Green's 1878 reserve, and Highwic, the Gothic Revival house built by businessman Alfred Buckland around 1863, now administered by Heritage New Zealand.
Who and what shaped it
People who shaped it
Landmark buildings
Plan your visit
On the map
When to go
Auckland's climate is temperate and maritime — winters (June–August) are mild but grey, with temperatures roughly between 8°C and 15°C and regular rain. Summers (December–February) are warm and humid, pushing into the low-to-mid 20s, which makes the shaded laneways and the Olympic Pool both earn their keep.
Right now
Background & history adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA) · specs from Wikidata (CC0) · weather from Open-Meteo · map data © OpenStreetMap contributors · photos from Wikimedia Commons / Unsplash with per-image credit. No third-party reviews or social posts reproduced.