Birchville is a suburb of Upper Hutt, New Zealand in the North Island. Its centre lies at the entrance to the Akatarawa Valley, in the north of the city, near confluence of the Akatarawa Stream with the Hutt River. It is about a 5 km (10-minute) drive north from the centre of Upper Hutt. The Birchville community is spread out along both banks of the Hutt River in a long fairly narrow valley.
Upper Hutt is a city in the Wellington Region of the North Island of New Zealand, and one of the four cities that constitute the Wellington metropolitan area.
New Zealand is a sovereign island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. The country geographically comprises two main landmasses—the North Island, and the South Island —and around 600 smaller islands. New Zealand is situated some 2,000 kilometres (1,200 mi) east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and roughly 1,000 kilometres (600 mi) south of the Pacific island areas of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. Because of its remoteness, it was one of the last lands to be settled by humans. During its long period of isolation, New Zealand developed a distinct biodiversity of animal, fungal, and plant life. The country's varied topography and its sharp mountain peaks, such as the Southern Alps, owe much to the tectonic uplift of land and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, while its most populous city is Auckland.
Although the developers originally pitched this housing development as a new suburb, this has not been accepted by the Upper Hutt City Council, which considers the subdivision to be part of the suburb of Birchville. Also, from as early as 1982, the New Zealand Geographic Board also clarified that Birchville, rather than Parkdale was the official locality name.[1] Local residents rarely refer to it as a suburb of its own.
The major through street is Gemstone Drive, which runs roughly West-East from Akatarawa Road to the end of the subdivision at Topaz Street, which then connects with State Highway 2. Most other streets in the subdivision are cul-de-sacs and are named, alphabetically from Akatarawa Road, after gemstones (e.g. Amber Grove, Moonstone Grove).
This subdivision has a reputation for being a down-market suburb, because a number of own-your-own or cross-leased units erected early in the development (although this trend did not continue as the development progressed).
There is a Jehovah's Witnesses church at the eastern end of the subdivision.
Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The group reports a worldwide membership of approximately 8.58 million adherents involved in evangelism and an annual Memorial attendance of over 20 million. Jehovah's Witnesses are directed by the Governing Body of Jehovah's Witnesses, a group of elders in Warwick, New York, which establishes all doctrines based on its interpretations of the Bible. They believe that the destruction of the present world system at Armageddon is imminent, and that the establishment of God's kingdom over the earth is the only solution for all problems faced by humanity.
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The Hutt River flows through the southern North Island of New Zealand. It flows south-west from the southern Tararua Range for 56 kilometres (35 mi), forming a number of fertile floodplains, including Kaitoke, central Upper Hutt and Lower Hutt.
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Emerald Hill is a hill in the suburb of Birchville, Upper Hutt, New Zealand. The name Emerald Hill has been applied to an up-market housing development on the north-eastern slopes of Emerald Hill that consists of around 4 or 5 streets off the end of Gemstone Drive, so as to distinguish it from the older and more down-market Parkdale subdivision.
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Birchville usually refers to a suburb of Upper Hutt in New Zealand. However, there are several other places in the world that either are, or have previously been named Birchville. Consider these alternatives:
Birchville Dam is believed to be the second unreinforced concrete arch dam built for water supply in New Zealand. It was built in 1930 for the Upper Hutt Borough Council to provide increased water capacity for the borough and replaced a water supply weir built in 1913–1914 at the same location on Clarke's Creek, near Birchville. Decommissioned in 1958, when Upper Hutt joined the Wellington regional water scheme, this dam is now an historic attraction on the Cannon Point Walkway.
The Haywards–Plimmerton Line was a railway development proposed several times between 1879 and the 1960s to connect the Hutt Valley and Porirua areas of Wellington via Haywards.
Price's Bush Tramway was around 1903 bush railway near Akatarawa in the Tararua Range of New Zealand's North Island with a raised third rail for braking the loaden trucks like on the Rimutaka Incline.
The May Morn Estates Tramway was a bush railway at Mangaroa, which crossed the Hutt River at Te Marua near Upper Hutt on New Zealand's North Island. The company was incorporated in 1912 and operated their saw mill at least from 1914 to 1915.
