Southdown is an

industrial suburb An industrial suburb is a community, near a large city, with an industrial economy. These communities may be established as tax havens or as places where zoning promotes industry, or they may be industrial towns that become suburbs by urban spr ...

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about ...

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

. The main company in the suburb was the former Southdown Freezing Works, part of a large industrial zone located near the

North Island Main Trunk The North Island Main Trunk (NIMT) is the main railway line in the North Island of New Zealand, connecting the capital city Wellington with the country's largest city, Auckland. The line is long, built to the New Zealand rail gauge of and se ...

railway line. The buildings were decommissioned during the 1980s and 1990s, releasing large areas of land to be redeveloped as office parks. For many years the abattoirs located here were discharging large amounts of untreated waste into the

Manukau Harbour The Manukau Harbour is the second largest natural harbour in New Zealand by area. It is located to the southwest of the Auckland isthmus, and opens out into the Tasman Sea. Geography The harbour mouth is between the northern head ("Burne ...

. This had a detrimental effect on the ecology of the harbour, which at the turn of the 20th century had been a popular and attractive place to swim, sail, fish and gather shell fish. For most of the middle of the 20th century it was a health hazard and its shell-fish a probable source of food poisoning. Since the freezing works were fully closed in 1981,''New Zealand Historical Atlas'' - McKinnon, Malcolm (Editor); David Bateman, 1997, Plate 97 the water quality has improved greatly. The

Waikaraka Cycleway The Waikaraka Cycleway is an off-road cycleway in the south of the Auckland isthmus, New Zealand, running from the suburb of Wesley along New Zealand State Highway 20 to Onehunga and then continuing along the shoreline of the Manukau Harbour ...

ends at the bottom of Hugo Johnston Drive, next to the defunct

Southdown Power Station Southdown Power Station was a natural gas-fired combined cycle gas turbine cogeneration power station in Southdown, a suburb in southern Auckland, New Zealand. When operational, it was New Zealand's northernmost power station with a capacity ex ...

. Hugo Johnston Drive is the site of a historic 2.5ha

asbestos cement Asbestos cement, genericized as fibro, fibrolite (short for "fibrous (or fibre) cement sheet") or AC sheet, is a building material in which asbestos fibres are used to reinforce thin rigid cement sheets. Although invented at the end of the 19t ...

dump used by James Hardie Industries from 1938 to 1983. The nearby Southdown Reserve (opposite the defunct Southdown Power Station) has been closed to the public since March 1999, after workers discovered asbestos material there.

References

External links

Photographs of Southdown
held in Auckland Libraries' heritage collections. Suburbs of Auckland Populated places around the Manukau Harbour {{Auckland-geo-stub