This South Island village is the smallest in New Zealand, based on the number of permanent residents - officially, only 10. Shayne Currie speaks to happy homeowners in a peaceful setting where properties are in hot demand.
“I love living here,” says Raewyn Hill, as she sits on the sofa in her Gore Bay home of five years overlooking some wild, wintry Pacific Ocean waves.
“I’m very happy in my own company. Solitude - fine. I’ve bought myself a camera; I get out and I photograph birds and seals and waves and God knows what ...”
Gore Bay - down a winding 8km road off State Highway 1 at Cheviot in North Canterbury - feels isolated and rather idyllic, despite the ocean waves on this cool Friday morning.
It also has a claim to fame. Before The Great NZ Road Trip started, I asked NZ Herald data editor Chris Knox to crunch the numbers on the smallest New Zealand village or town based on permanent residents. He produced a spreadsheet, showing Gore Bay at the top.
Based on Stats NZ’s subnational population estimates in June 2024, Gore Bay has just 10 permanent residents. It may be as low as 5 or as high as 14 (Stats NZ rounds to the nearest 10).
There are dozens of homes here, but 95% of them are usually vacant. They are holiday and weekend escapes, a mix of traditional baches (or cribs) and bigger houses. They carry names such as Gore Blimey, Le Crib and Bayview.
Most of them are very well-maintained; a few cling to steep parts of the hill overlooking Gore Bay’s sweeping beach; others are oceanfront, or set one road back from the beach.
One house has been built around a traditional Christchurch tram that was moved to the property decades ago, although it’s hard to make out where the tram framework starts and ends.
Gore Bay might have only 10 or so permanent residents, but it has a mighty big heart, epitomised by Hill, who invited us in for a chat on Friday, despite us interrupting her breakfast.
She first came here in 2019, after wanting to find a peaceful escape from Christchurch and spotting Gore Bay on a map. She visited and was almost immediately smitten.
She counted around a dozen other permanent residents living in Gore Bay right now. A couple from Christchurch have just moved into Tainui Rise, one of four or five streets in the settlement.
“I know of them all,” she says of the permanent residents. “I’m not necessarily in their pockets. Well, none of us is in each other’s pockets. That’s the good thing about being here.
“We know quite a lot about each other, and we might have the odd lunch.”
She says the residents look out for each other. It’s a happy place - the tranquillity interrupted only by the sometimes wild Pacific Ocean.
“It’s a very generous community. I get given eggs and fruit and vegetables and strawberries, and flowers. There’s a couple up the hill - they’ve got a property and she grows daffodils, she has about 20 different varieties. She has to pick them so they don’t cross-pollinate. They give me a bucket of them.
“I love living here. People are just awesome. You just don’t get it elsewhere.”
These days, properties at Gore Bay are in hot demand, says Hill.
She rented for a while before buying her home in June 2020. The RV back then was about $320,000; today it’s $520,000.
She says homes in Gore Bay might sell for anywhere between $600,000 and $1 million these days.
“When I first came here, there were probably nine places for sale, and none of them, not one of them, would sell.
“And then all of a sudden, one by one, they went. And now - unless it’s $1m, of course - they get snapped up pretty quickly.”
Ross Barnes was clearing vegetation and mowing the lawns at his holiday house when we caught up with him.
“We bought our house in 2020. I always wanted to have a bach here because of the history,” he says, before taking us on an impromptu walking tour.
“You come around the corner there, you see the sea, you smell the sea, and everything just goes chill. It’s a time warp. It really is - it hasn’t changed in my lifetime.”
Barnes and his wife, Claudine, live at Mt Lyford, but he has a long family history in the settlement, visiting regularly as a child.
His grandfather, Malcolm Hyde, lived here. Malcolm and his brother, Alec, built and laid the original Gore Bay tennis courts by hand.
“I had the privilege of redoing them two years ago. Fifty years earlier, my grandfather was doing it by hand, and here we were resurfacing the whole thing in a day with a concrete pump. Modern technology!”
So there are tennis courts, a camping ground, a public toilet and a telephone box, but there’s little else in the way of facilities: the nearest shops are at Cheviot. But that’s just fine for the handful of permanent residents.
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Gore Bay has a strong farming heritage. Legendary English-born runholder William “Ready Money” Robinson, who came to New Zealand in 1856, established a slipway there in the 1870s.
There are still physical links to that history. A cottage at 60 Moody St once belonged to Robinson’s wife, Eliza. It is registered by Heritage New Zealand as a Category II structure.
Up the hill, on the road towards Cheviot, sits the old Gore Bay schoolhouse on a lifestyle property. It is now privately owned.
It was sold by owner Judy Grigor, 85, late last year for an undisclosed sum - it had been on the market for offers over $800,000. Grigor had bought and saved the old classroom for $500 in 1980.
As OneRoof reported earlier this year, Grigor attended Gore Bay Primary between 1943 and 1948.
By 1949, the school’s roll had dwindled to just five and it closed that year. The old schoolhouse became a community hall and then a cabin at the campground, until Grigor bought it and relocated it to its new property.
Gore Bay’s population swells at the peak of summer; the two campgrounds are especially full for the two weeks between late December and early January.
It’s a popular place for Christchurch residents wanting a reasonably easy escape, but even so, it’s all manageable, says Hill. There still aren’t “squillions of people”.
She has some of her own holiday adventures planned - away from Gore Bay. “I’ve just recently bought myself a campervan and I’m going to do a little bit of tiki touring, but it’s like, why do I want to go and see another beach when I’ve got this beautiful place here? But why not?”
She says her heart will be in Gore Bay for the rest of her life. “This is where I live and this is where I’ll stay. Yeah, they’ll cart me out of here.”
Editor-at-Large Shayne Currie is one of New Zealand’s most experienced senior journalists and media leaders. He has held executive and senior editorial roles at NZME, including Managing Editor, NZ Herald Editor and Herald on Sunday Editor.