04/09/2026
Tag a family who this story belongs to.
I've sold homes in Canterbury for years, and there's a question I keep coming back to: who actually built these suburbs? Not the developers. The people.
Starting this September, I'm running a six-part documentary series called Ancient Relics, the story of how New Zealand grew, how its people evolved, and how their homes changed, told through the experience of Pacific families who arrived in Canterbury with very little and built something lasting.
We'll start at the beginning: arrival, in the 1950s and 60s, and what "home" meant to a family stepping off a wharf into a country they'd only heard about. From there we'll walk through the first houses, often shared, often cold, often nothing like what they'd pictured. Each episode I'll also step in with my own lens on it, the actual layout of these homes, what changed, what got added, and what a property like that looks like today compared to when it was first built. And we'll bring it right up to today the suburbs Canterbury loves now, and the communities who quietly built them.
This isn't a marketing series. There's no listing at the end of it. It's a story I think Canterbury deserves to hear properly, told with the respect it deserves and with an honest look at how these homes physically evolved along the way.
