A horse-powered economy shaped what people bought and sold, how goods moved, and how people travelled. Generations of breeding, training and horsemanship produced winning racehorses, including Phar Lap, born in Seadown, Timaru, in 1926. As technology and needs changed, horses were joined, and increasingly replaced, by bicycles, rail and motor vehicles, and the CBD adapted.
Timaru’s CBD was, and still is, a place of exchange, bringing people together to trade, work, shop, meet, share ideas and find entertainment across the region, country and world.
NOTE: Timaru’s streets were widely renumbered in the early 1920s, with the new Stafford St numbers in use by 1924. Because some addresses changed, historic street numbers cannot always be matched to modern addresses.