Our towns and cities would look very different if the original plans for them had been followed.
Many of the original settlers and town fathers had amazing ideas, many brought from the old European capitals that had been settled for thousands of years.
New Zealand, however, was a very new country and it could be anything.
Wellington, originally called Port Nicholson, was favoured because of its easy harbour. It was simple to get ships filled with goods to the growing city.
The land was hilly in places, with decent beaches and there was a lagoon fed by a stream where the Basin Reserve is now.
In 1840, Surveyor General, Captain William Mein Smith, wanted Wellington to shine.
He had bright ideas for how it was to look and one idea was a canal through the centre of the city that would lead ships to the Basin where they would be able to harbour.
Smith drew up plans for it and the concept was on the verge of being created.
Before it would be put into action though, an earthquake changed everything.
On January 23, 1855 a 8.2 magnitude earthquake hit along the Wairarapa faultline. It was felt throughout the country and is still considered the biggest felt since European colonisation began.
Several people were killed in the Wairarapa and a bridge over the Hutt river was destroyed. But in Wellington, after a rebuild after the 1848 earthquake, damage was limited.
However the land around the harbour rose and previously used jetties were badly damaged.
A lot of land around the foreshore was able to be reclaimed and much of what is Wellington central business district now is built on it.
One of the biggest changes however was that the Basin drained and turned into a swamp.
Two years later citizens began asking the Provincial Council about a permanent cricket ground.
They were given the swamp.
Determined to make it work, with free prison labour, the land was drained and flattened and what would become the famous Basin Reserve cricket ground - still in use today - was created.
Smith was born on September 7, 179,9 in Cape Town in South Africa, the eldest son of William Proctor Smith and his wife Mary Mein.
He went into the army at the age of 14, then obtained a commission in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of Captain.
In 1839 the New Zealand company took him on as its first surveyor general. He arrived on the Cuba in 1840.
He immediately got to work and began laying out Wellington, Petone and Thorndon. By 1841 he and his staff had surveyed a number of country sections from Pencarrow to Porirua.
He went on to map the harbours on the South Island’s east coast and climbed the Port Hills.
Smith often sketched what he saw and his books are now in the Alexander Turnbull Library.
Early in 1845 Smith and his family moved to Huangarua, between Greytown and Martinborough, in Wairarapa, where in partnership with Samuel Revans he became a successful runholder.
He did a survey of the Wairarapa, did a coastal survey of Castle Point, explored Manawatu and laid out plans for Featherston.
In 1865 he retired to Woodside, near Greytown and died at Woodside January 3, 1869.
He is buried in Greytown Cemetery.​

Most of us are used to the cry of the ruru or morepork, but once there was a disturbing cackle or laugh.
It came from the now believed extinct laughing owl called hakoke or korohengi in the North Island rather than whekau, as it was in the South.
Twice the size of the morepork, it also hunted on the ground. This likely helped lead to its extinction.
Once the kiore - or Pacific rat arrived - it began to eat the owl’s food source only to turn into prey itself
But the owl could not adapt to cats, stoats and ferrets.
One of the mounted birds at Te Papa Museum is a laughing owl, the last known bird was found dead on a road in Timaru in 1914, having been hit by a car.
Since then the sound of its maniacal laughter has been heard as late as the 1980s but no bird has been reliably seen.
The first owl to be preserved was collected at Waikouaiti on the North Otago coast in 1843 by Percy Earl, a well known specimen collector who sent it to the British Museum.
But most of what we know comes from Thomas Henry Potts, considered one of New Zealand’s earliest conservationists.
Born in London on November 23, 1824, the son of Thomas Potts and his wife Mary Ann Freeman, he inherited the family gun making business which was later bought out.
He came to New Zealand with his wife Emma in 1854 with three children and once here had another 10.
They settled in Hororata and Thomas began exploring and claimedland for a farm.
Thomas was a member of the Canterbury Acclimatisation Society and the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury, and a president of the horticultural society as well as an original trustee of the Canterbury Museum.
He often championed the natural environment, protesting the destruction of totara in 1868.
His biggest passion was natural history, motivated by the search for ferns and birds, which he wanted protected.
He saw both living and dead laughing owls, but considered their cry to be unearthly rather than like laughter.
Thomas later proposed that Resolution Island become a reserve, which happened in 1892.
He did not live to see it though. Thomas died in Christchurch on
July 27, 1888 and is buried in Linwood Cemetery.​

New Zealand has more than enough criminals of its own without importing them.
But in 1915 a woman who had been convicted of one murder and suspected of more moved here and made headlines.
Linda Laura Hazzard was nicknamed the Starvation Doctor for her ideas that led to her being convicted of the death of one woman but was likely responsible for the deaths of many more.
She had been born Lynda Laura Burfield in Minnesota on December 18, 1867, the eldest child of Montgomery and Susanna Burfield.
She never had any type of medical degree but through a loophole in the law was able to practise medicine as an alternative practitioner.
Linda developed a fasting method that she claimed cured all sorts of illnesses.
She even wrote three books about fasting.
In Washington she established a sanitarium called Wilderness Heights where patients went to fast for days, or weeks and sometimes months. They existed on small amounts of tomato, asparagus juice and sometimes orange juice.
Some of course survived but dozens died in her care. She always claimed they had died of some undiagnosed illness.
Opponents claimed she was simply starving them to death.
In 1912, she was convicted of the manslaughter of Claire Williamson, a wealthy British woman, who weighed less than fifty pounds at the time of her death. At the trial, it was proven that Hazzard had forged Williamson's will and stolen most of her valuables.
Hazzard was sentenced to 2-20 years in prison.
By 1915 she was granted a pardon but she and her husband Samuel Hazzard opted to move to New Zealand where she practised as a dietician and osteopath.
Despite a Whanganui paper reporting she had a medical qualification in America she ended up being charged here with using the title doctor and not being registered here.
She was fined £5.
Three years later she and her husband returned to Olalla, America and opened a new sanitarium- but it was called a school of health as her medical license there had been revoked.
Linda continued to supervise fasts until the ‘school’ burned down in 1935 and she never tried to rebuild it.
It’s hard to know now whether she was simply ahead of her time or truly a killer. A newspaper article about her mentions her work in chiropractics where she talking about therapeutic treatment for disease through the adjustment of the spine, to relieving pressure or tension upon nerve filaments.
She says that many troubles arise from a slipping of a vertebra which presses on a nerve. Dr. Hazzard uses chiropractic methods largely in the care of lumbago, which is commonly considered a form of rheumatism. She says that lumbago is caused by the slipping of a vertebra in the lumbar region, and that the care is to adjust the vertebra back into its place.
Creepily the paper said a large portion of Dr. Hazzard's knowledge of the human body has been gained by post mortem examinations, she haying performed some' hundreds of these during the past sixteen years.
Ironically Hazzard herself died of starvation in 1938 while attempting a fasting cure and was buried in the Queen Anne Columbarium in Seattle.​