Foodtown (707 Great South Road)

While not the same as it once was, across the road you can see the site of one of the earliest supermarkets in the country. The store was built by greengrocers Tom Ah Chee, Norm Kent, and John Brown and, despite being located in Papatoetoe, the store was known alternately both as the ‘Ōtāhuhu Foodtown’ and the ‘Ōtara Foodtown’, showcasing the interconnected nature of these suburbs over the decades.

The store first opened on 18 June 1958 and boasted 118 parking spaces. According to reports, hundreds of people arrived at the store within its first hour of business to experience the phenomenon of the ‘all-convenience’ store, which was a new concept at the time. Though the store closed down in the 1990s, the building also featured as a filming location for the 1994 film ‘Once Were Warriors’.

Another piece of history that no longer survives is the 10th milepost, which indicated that it was ten miles from that point to the port of Auckland. This was one in a series of these wooden mileposts installed along the Great South Road between Auckland and Drury in the 1860s. Some sources suggest they had a military origin, while others claim that the Auckland Provincial Council had them installed. Whatever their origin, many of the mileposts disappeared during the reconstruction of the Great South Road during the 1920s.

In 1936 the Auckland Automobile Association marked the locations of the surviving posts with signs that dated them to 1860. This date has been used in many sources since. The 10th milepost was originally installed just south of the Tāmaki Bridge, but was later relocated to the entrance of the Foodtown supermarket while it still operated in this location. This milepost disappeared sometime after 1998.

Continue walking along Great South Road.