Mount Cook, Wellington

Mount Cook is an inner suburb of the metropolitan area of Wellington, The North Island, New Zealand, 1.74 km dead south of Wellington's Central Business District. Its local constituency area is the Wellington Central, and is part of the City of Wellington local government area. At the 2013 Census, Mount Cook had a population of 5, 112.[1]

Mount Cook
Suburb
Mount Cook
Coordinates: 41°18′06″S 174°46′27″E
Country	New Zealand
Local authority	Wellington City
Population  (2013)[1]
• Total	5,112

Aro Valley	Te Aro	Mount Victoria
	Mount Cook	Hataitai
Brooklyn	Newtown

After being settled by Maori since roughly 1000 CE, the Mount Cook area was situated on a fertile hill, just south of Te Aro Pā. The hill was the origin-point of the original survey marks through Wellington. It was given its current name by the New Zealand Company, after Captain James Cook (the mountain in the South Island was named separately), and was the suite of a large British military base, and later a prison that was "loathed by Wellingtonians", and demolished in 1931.[2][3]

During the Victorian and Edwardian eras, Mt Cook became a favoured suburb of Wellington's elite, and many palatial mansions, such as the timber houses known as "painted ladies", were constructed along the Kent and Edward Terrace rivers; After the Earthquake of 1855, many were built around what was now the Basin Reserve. Densely populated mid-to-postwar Wellington had all eyes on Mount Cook, where the Dominion Museum and the Carilion opened for the country's 100th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi, in 1940.[4] Over the span of its history, Mount Cook has become known for its culture of bohemianism and preservation of uniquely Wellingtonian Victorian Architecture. Mount Cook's attractions and institutions include the Colonial Cottage Museum, the Wellington campus of Massey University and the National War Memorial, and, to cricketers locally and around the world, the Basin Reserve.

Standing on the southern fringe of the central city alongside Te Aro and to the north of Newtown, the population increased by 261 people in between 2006–13.