The exhibition the square didn't get

The first thing the record says about Cranmer Square is that somebody fenced it. In July 1869 the city council's works committee had fencing plans prepared for the square; by the end of August the works return has men erecting the posts. It is the earliest moment the archive catches the square being treated as a place at all — not just a gap the survey left between the streets.

Twelve years on, two men had a much larger idea for the same grass. In January 1882 the promoters Joubert and Twopeny asked the city council for the use of Cranmer Square to put up buildings for an international exhibition they planned to open that April.

Twopeny made the ask in person, at an informal council meeting called on a day's notice. The promoters would sign a bond to hand the square back "in exactly the same condition as it was before", he said, and would not injure a tree. Latimer Square was out of the question — money had just been spent laying it out — but Cranmer he could see no difficulty with. The Akaroa Mail, writing the same week, called the venture entirely a commercial speculation, and allowed that it would still fill the city with visitors and draw the eyes of foreign manufacturers to Christchurch.

It never happened there. When the International Exhibition opened that April, its buildings stood in Hagley Park, on the angle made by the junction of the Riccarton and Lincoln roads, with the volunteer artillery's howitzers parked in the park for the occasion. Cranmer Square kept its grass.

What the papers do record about the square is quieter, and it runs for decades. Through the 1900s its edges were a ring of lodging and boarding houses: boarders wanted at number 22, a four-roomed cottage to let at 30, Mrs F. A. Bishop at number 10 advertising twice in one autumn for a good general servant. The exhibition the square didn't get remains the most interesting thing that nearly happened to it.