Horner Street in Papanui -Named after William Horner (1833-1905) and his wife, Mary. Horner was the first blacksmith in Papanui. From 1873 he lived in a 16-roomed homestead on Papanui Road, an early Canterbury prefabricated house. He sold off most of the 50 acres originally with this property. Horner Street is first mentioned in the Star in 1880 in an advertisement. First appears in street directories in 1887.
A small amount of information from the library website. Lots of mentions on Papers Past and in 1880s there were several mentions about Horner’s Township. William Horner named the streets in the Township after family members. There were at least two articles in 1960 about Horner family reunion and these articles talked about William arriving in NZ on the ship Contarf in 1859 from Yorkshire. The family said that there is a family link to story of Little Jack Horner. There were many birth and death notices plus garden competition notices. There were a few mentions of a Memorial Hall especially about the area around it being badly lit. I suspect that the Memorial Hall was where the Memorial Garden is now sited which is near Papanui Rd end. In 1913 a new Post Office to be built on corner of Horner St and Papanui Rd. The Papanui library was on Horner St in an old council building and was run by volunteers until it moved in the late 1970s. There were two sad stories from this street. One was that one of the victims from the Wahine lived on this street. The other story was a missing woman in 1947 and sadly her body was found three weeks later in an open drain near Papanui Technical College.
At the Papanui Rd end there is the Memorial Garden plus several businesses. The houses here cover most decades specially 1930s and 1940s but the one that I really liked is dated from 1910. Managed to walk the street before the storm hit.
Lytteltonwitch's Walking the streets of Christchurch Project 