For more than seventy years one of the towers that helped shape the Queen Street skyline has been sitting behind a sheet of tin, and most Aucklanders had no idea it was still there.
Scaffolding around the historic St James Theatre has been drawn back while work is carried out on the building’s Queen Street frontage, and what has emerged is the ornate upper face of the original 1928 theatre. Gold detailing, deep reds and blues and the remains of the Spanish Mission tower are visible from the footpath for the first time since 1953. 1News reported the tower will stay in view until 1 September, when the scaffolding goes back up and the restoration continues.
The building it belongs to is one of the most significant surviving theatres in the country. Auckland Council’s own short history of the St James records a 2,100 seat venue designed by Henry Eli White, with an ornate Spanish Mission interior and one of only a handful of New Zealand auditoriums built with three levels of seating. It opened for live theatre and vaudeville and moved quickly into talking pictures as the film industry took hold.
What happened next is the reason the tower vanished. In the early 1950s Auckland was preparing for the arrival of a newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, and the whole Queen Street facade was given a post-war makeover. The decorative frontage was boxed in behind new cladding, metal sheeting and neon signage, and the theatre took on the flat modern look that generations of Aucklanders grew up with.
St James Holdings director Steve Bielby told 1News there was a long running joke about the lengths cities went to before a royal visit.
“Essentially the joke is that the Queen thinks the world smells of fresh paint. Because before she came anywhere, everywhere got a facelift,” Bielby said.
The royal connection was not a one off. The council history notes that Queen Elizabeth visited the theatre three times, during the 1953 royal tour and again in 1963 and 1981. Newsreel footage from that first visit, replayed by 1News, captured the mood of the night, with the narrator declaring that “it’s an occasion which brings to Auckland a touch of London’s enchantment”.
It is worth being precise about what survived behind the cladding, because the tower that has reappeared is not quite the one in the old photographs. The Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga list entry for the theatre, List Number 4404, describes a tower over the Queen Street entrance that could be seen from the waterfront, topped by a decorative globe. During the mid 1950s work the turret and its globe were removed outright and the top portion of the building was encased. The original electric sign came down at the same time. So the globe is long gone, but the ornamental frontage underneath was simply sealed up rather than stripped, and it has spent seven decades in the dark.
Nobody was certain how much of it was left until the layers started coming off. Bielby said the crew worked through the newer skin without knowing what they would find.
“They cut through the first façade and were like, ‘Oh, there’s just some tin back here’,” he said. “They cut through that and we sort of popped our heads through.”
What they found was in better condition than anyone expected. “One of the really cool things about this is that it was covered in the ’50s and essentially became a time capsule,” Bielby said. “It’s been really well preserved.”
The reveal also restores something to the shape of the city centre. The St James tower was once one of three landmark towers clustered in that part of town. The other two, on the Civic Theatre and the Auckland Town Hall, stayed in plain sight while the St James disappeared behind its new front. For the next few weeks all three can be picked out again from the same stretch of street.
Behind the frontage, a far larger job is under way. The theatre is a Category 1 historic place on the Heritage New Zealand list, entered in November 1988, and is also scheduled as a Category A historic heritage place under the Auckland Unitary Plan. It has been closed since 2007, when fire damage forced it to shut. Demolition work on the Queen Street end of the complex began in 2015 and the theatre itself was mothballed in 2016, which is where it sat through years of failed deals, funding gaps and public campaigning.
The money finally came together through a shared arrangement, with the Government and Auckland Council each committing $15 million towards the restoration and the council reconfirming its share in February 2025. St James Holdings and the Auckland Notable Properties Trust are covering the rest of a project that has been costed at tens of millions of dollars. Work is now aimed at reopening the theatre in 2028, which would land on its hundredth birthday.
The restored main auditorium is expected to hold about 1,480 people seated or up to 2,400 standing, with a new basement venue for up to 1,200 people being built underneath. The list of names that played the St James across almost a century of Auckland entertainment includes Laurence Olivier, James Brown, Miles Davis and Joni Mitchell, and the owners want the building back in that business rather than standing as a monument.
Bielby made the case for the tower in simple terms. Visitors do not walk up Queen Street to photograph glass office blocks, he said.
“They come up and take photos of our amazing town hall, of our Civic, of our train station,” he said. “And this tower, hopefully, will be one of them.”
The uncovering was first reported earlier this month and has drawn a steady trickle of people stopping mid footpath to look up, phones out. For anyone who wants to see it, the window is short. After 1 September the scaffolding goes back on and the tower disappears again, this time with a return date attached.
Have you stopped to look at the St James tower, or do you remember the theatre before it closed? Tell us in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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