page_title: New Zealand Centennial Exhibition
section_title: Location
hierarchical_section_title: New Zealand Centennial Exhibition / Location
caption_attribution_description: Aerial view of Rongotai, Wellington, including buildings for the New Zealand Centennial Exhibition, 1939 Reference Number: 1/4-019697-F Photographer: William Hall Raine Film negative Photographic Archive, Alexander Turnbull Library Image information at National Library website
context_page_description: The New Zealand Centennial Exhibition took place over six months from Wednesday 8 November 1939 until 4 May 1940. It celebrated one hundred years since the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 and the subsequent mass European settlement of New Zealand. 2,641,043 visitors attended the exhibition.
  The New Zealand Government staged the exhibition with assistance from local government, New Zealand industry and the New Zealand public. The exhibition received support from the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, Fiji and other Pacific islands who either constructed their own pavilions on site or had displays in one of the exhibition buildings.
context_section_description: The exhibition took for its site a location at Rongotai in Wellington, Edmund Anscombe designing the buildings and grounds in the Art Deco style. Construction began on 27 April 1939 by the firm Fletcher and Love Construction Companies and over 1,000 staff were employed in the process of building the exhibition. The exhibition grounds were just over 55 acres (220,000 m²) in size, with the main buildings accounting for around 14 acres (57,000 m²) of this.
  Feature structures included:
  the Centennial Tower, the main focus of attention, standing 155 feet (47 m) tall and weighing 700 tons. This icon featured on many of the souvenirs celebrating the exhibition.
  a statue of a Neriad (a sea-woman on a seahorse) standing in the central fountain.
  the New Zealand Railways Department stand featuring a working model-railway constructed to scale and maintained by Frank Roberts (model maker).
  2,641,043 (2.6 million) visitors attended the exhibition. The last time an event of such a scale had been held was the New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition in 1925–26, when 3.2 million visitors were counted at the exhibition in Dunedin. Anscombe had also been the architect for the Dunedin exhibition.
caption: Aerial view of Rongotai in 1939 showing the exhibition buildings
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