QUARRY MAMAGERS HOUSE

Halswell Quarry Managers House from my old buildings of my local area
series.
Built in the early 1920 of Halswell Stone for the Quary Manager
The Halswell Quarry became a park in 1990 managed by the Christchurch City Council and is registered with the Historic places trust .
The Managers House has not been lived in since and is used for storage .


Halswell Quarry

Opened in the 1850s, the quarry supplied stone for many distinctive Christchurch buildings, including Canterbury Museum, the Old Normal School on Cranmer Square, the Sign of the Takahe, Durham Street Methodist Church, Sunnyside Hospital, and the Provincial Council Chambers. Crushed, the stone was used as gravel under roads, while the columnar baslt visible in the quarry walls was used along rivers to strengthen their banks against erosion. Production ceased in 1990 at what is considered to be the oldest continuously operated quarry in Australasia.

Around 6 million years ago, basalt from the Lyttelton Volcano cooled rapidly to form the distinctive, fine-grained Halswell Stone, which breaks easily into sheets along its joints to form a useful building material. Water entering these joints left chemical deposits to form the distinctive black speckling of the Halswell Stone.