Retreat Road in Avonside – Named after The Retreat, the property there of Thomas Hichens (1795-1868).Hichens, a gentleman, was living at The Retreat in 1853. He had bought part of Rural Section 90, 50 acres on the “South Bank River Avon, near Slaughterhouse Road” (later Woodham Road and Mile Road), land which had earlier been selected by A. P. Perceval. By 1863, John Gwalter Palairet (1798-1878) had bought the property. He is listed in the Avon electoral roll for 1863 as living at The Retreat, Avonside. Retreat Road first appears in the Star in 1877 in a report of a meeting of the Heathcote Road Board.
A reasonable amount of information from the library website. Papers Past had a huge number of death notices. In 1880 the road board called for tenders for forming the road. In 1894 there was a complaint about the state of the road and the issue was gorse on the road. Three landowners were ordered to clear the gorse on their properties. Thomas and his wife lived at a property called Penavon but don’t know if this house was on Retreat Rd.
There are now only 28 houses on this street and many are wooden villas from the 1920s. The rest of the street is now in the red zone. I had a memory of visiting a scout shop on this street when I was a cub leader back in the 1990s. I checked street view from 2007 and the scout shop was near the river and has now been demolished. Many of the houses that used to be on this street looked like 1920s villas and a couple looked like they would have been lovely. It looks like only about 20% of the houses on this street survived the earthquakes.
Lytteltonwitch's Walking the streets of Christchurch Project 