As a child, many of our family outings and holidays revolved around my late father’s writing and publishing interests: New Zealand’s natural and human history. Sometimes it was wading birds — yawn — but often it was historic sites and buildings, ghost towns and museums. Now I’ve got kids of my own I frequently inflict this type of activity on them in turn.

While my sister and I might have whined about it some of the time, these sorts of trips did instil in me a love of New Zealand’s historic places and their fascinating stories. So it was with some delight that I opened the pages of Who Lived There? (In fact, the first time I encountered the book was when I edited the text some months ago, but I was still excited to see it in book form and fully illustrated.)

Nicola McCloy is a great storyteller who also has a passion for both our heritage and for telling a great yarn. She’s written quite a pile of popular books about New Zealand’s places and people; Who Lived There? is the ideal vehicle for her talents.

The book has a roughly north-south geographical structure, shining a light on more than 60 buildings from the Hokianga to Southland. Despite the book’s title, not all the buildings featured here are homes; many are commercial or industrial buildings including historic stores, stations, farm buildings and even the turnstile at Dunedin’s storied Carisbrook stadium.

Who Lived There? features some more familiar and frequently visited places such as the Heritage New Zealand properties Pompallier at Russell in the Bay of Islands and Fyffe House at Kaikōura; the Chateau Tongariro; Riccarton House in Christchurch; and the Katherine Mansfield House in Wellington. There are schools and factories, a power station, several pubs and a brewery as well as lighthouses, blockhouses, farmhouses and an ice-cream garden.

But it’s the lesser-known buildings and their stories which particularly attracted me including some which I had not heard of before: the Ōtaki rotunda (sister-building to another of my obsessions, the Soldiers’ Block at the former Queen Mary Hospital in Hanmer), the Lawrence Chinese camp, Langfords store at Bainham in Golden Bay and the West Coast ghost town of Waiuta, which probably deserves a whole book of its own. (McCloy is a proud South Islander and not one to let the many gems of Te Waipounamu go unilluminated.)

Of course, reading about many of these places means they were immediately added to my ‘must visit’ list. When I was in the upper South Island in April, I dragged my longsuffering family up a side-road on the way from Blenheim to Nelson to have a gander at the Rai Valley Cottage but sadly I couldn’t convince them to take a diversion to Bainham. Next time!

McCloy doesn’t dwell on the architectural detail of each building (although any interesting design or construction information is included) but tells the story of its human use and habitation. And while history often seems to belong to pale, stale males, here there are many stories of women and Māori (and Māori women), including Mary Geddes of Couldrey House at Wenderholm, just north of Auckland, the Brain sisters of Brain Watkins House in Tauranga and the Buxton women of Broadgreen House near Nelson.

King’s accompanying photographs are utilitarian rather than filtered and picture-postcard but they suit the mood of the book: these are buildings which were lived, loved, worked and died in, not stuffy museum-pieces or forgotten ruins. Through these seemingly prosaic buildings we can connect with a heritage which goes beyond the grand and lauded and tells the engrossing stories of ordinary Kiwis.

Reviewed by Sarah Ell