The buses start arriving on North Road before most of the street has had breakfast. Baldwin Street has been the world’s steepest for most of the last four decades, give or take a nine-month Welsh interruption, and the record has turned 350 metres of North East Valley into a destination. What gets lost in the photographs is that people live here – the 1 in 2.86 is their driveway, not a novelty.
The Street Was an Accident
A Grid Drawn on the Other Side of the World
Nobody designed Baldwin Street to be steep. Dunedin’s street plan was surveyed by Charles Kettle in the mid-19th century, and like a lot of early New Zealand towns the grid went onto paper first and met the ground afterwards – often drawn up by planners in London who had never laid eyes on Signal Hill.
The street takes its name from William Baldwin, an Otago Provincial Councillor and newspaper founder who subdivided the land around it. He got a street named after him. The people who ended up living on it got a gradient.
That accident is worth holding onto, because everything since – the record, the buses, the Jaffas – follows from a line drawn on a map by someone who was never going to have to walk it.
Asphalt at the Bottom, Concrete at the Top
Walk in from North Road and the first stretch is unremarkable. Baldwin Street runs about 350 metres east from the Lindsay Creek valley up the side of Signal Hill towards Opoho, climbing from roughly 30 metres above sea level to 100 metres at the top. The lower reaches are only moderately steep and sealed in asphalt, which is why people arrive looking mildly unimpressed.
Then the surface changes. The top 200 metres are concrete, laid that way for easier maintenance and for grip through Dunedin’s frosts.
The final 161.2 metres gain 47.2 metres of height, an average of 1 in 3.41, and the steepest pinch – about 70 metres from the top – runs at roughly 1 in 2.86. That is 19 degrees, or 35 percent, and it is the point where the conversation stops.
The Rest of the Valley Is Not Flat Either
Baldwin is the extreme of a set rather than a freak on its own. The streets climbing the same hillside beside it would be notable almost anywhere else:
– Arnold Street, at 1 in 3.6
– Dalmeny Street, at 1 in 3.7
– Calder Avenue, at 1 in 5.4
It is also a dead end for cars. At the top it meets Buchanan Street, a footpath following an unpaved road across to Calder Avenue and Arnold Street, which is how you loop back on foot instead of retracing the climb.
Live around here and the steepness is not a novelty. It is the shape of the neighbourhood.
What a 1-in-2.86 Does to an Ordinary Week
Getting the Car Up, and Getting It Down Again
The gradient stops being interesting and starts being admin the moment you own a car. There is no safe turning area at the top, the carriageway is narrow, and the street terminates – so everything that goes up has to come back down, and first-timers tend to work that out halfway. Driving up is discouraged, and campervans should not attempt it at all.
Residents manage it the way anyone manages their own house. You learn which way to park, you get the handbrake habit, you carry the shopping in the order you want to unpack it, and you write very clear directions for anyone visiting. Couriers either know the street or find out.
None of that makes the brochures. It is what living on a 35 percent slope actually consists of.
Frost, Snow, and the Reason for the Concrete
The concrete is not an aesthetic decision. Frosts settle into North East Valley and stay there, and a hard, textured surface is what keeps the steep half usable while the rest of the city is scraping windscreens.
Then there are the days the valley gets snow properly. This August a skier turned up to have a crack at the steepest street while Dunedin’s roads were behaving like ski fields, which is precisely the sort of thing this street attracts.
For the people who live here, a snow day is less a spectacle than a logistics problem with an audience.
The Buses Are There Before the Coffee
The Early Crowd and the Photo Angle
Visitor numbers have climbed steadily since the record, and social media has done the rest. The street is a fixed stop on bus itineraries and in travel guides, which gives it a daily rhythm: quiet early, busy from mid-morning, busiest around midday when the coaches overlap. Parking is free on North Road and Lovelock Avenue, and on a good summer weekend both fill up.
It has its own website now, which tells you how completely a residential road can turn into a destination.
Go early if you are going. Better light, empty footpath, and the people who live there are more likely to be asleep than watching you photograph their fence.
Gardens, Bins, and the Limits of Goodwill
Residents are not of one mind about any of it. Some enjoy it, and there is something in living somewhere people cross the world to see. Others have had enough of visitors walking through their gardens, lying down in the road for photographs, and attempting three-point turns on the steepest sealed street on the planet.
When Wales briefly took the title in 2019, Otago Chamber of Commerce chief executive Dougal McGowan suggested it might be a blessing in disguise for residents fed up with crowds, trampled gardens and bad driving decisions. That is a mild way of describing a real tension.
The street has drawn record hunters and daredevils too, some sanctioned and plenty not. In March 2001 a 19-year-old University of Otago student was killed when the wheelie bin she and another student were riding down it struck a parked trailer. It is the part of the story nobody puts on a postcard, and it is why locals are less charmed by stunts than visitors tend to expect.
Jaffas, Steps, and the Way Back Down
For all that, the street is good fun and the locals know it. There are steps up the side for anyone who wants them and seats partway up for anyone who needs them, which is a small piece of thoughtfulness that gets left out of the photographs.
The Jaffas are the tradition that stuck. The organised race that used to send them rolling down the concrete is no longer run, but families still turn up with a packet, send them off from the top and watch them go. A fair proportion get eaten on the way up.
From the top you look out over the Quarry Gardens and the hills behind them. Getting down is a choice between the zig-zag steps, the street itself, or the walk through the hazelnut orchard – and the debate about which is best takes longer than the climb did.
The Record, Lost and Won Back
Two Years of Paperwork, Then a Welsh Interruption
Guinness recognised Baldwin Street as the world’s steepest in 1987, after a two-year campaign by the broadcaster Jim Mora – a reminder that world records are mostly paperwork and persistence. It displaced two competing streets in San Francisco that had been trading the title between themselves.
The definition is the interesting part. Guinness measures which street gains the most altitude over 10 horizontal metres, taken along the centreline, and that last word does the heavy lifting. On 16 July 2019 Baldwin lost the title to Ffordd Pen Llech in Wales, recorded at 37.45 percent against Baldwin’s 35. Then mayor Dave Cull floated changing the signage to the southern hemisphere’s steepest street, which went down here about as well as you would expect.
Dunedin residents appealed, led by the surveyor Toby Stoff, and the case came down to where on a curving road you take the measurement. On 8 April 2020 Guinness ruled it had to be the central axis, which put Ffordd Pen Llech at 28.6 percent and Baldwin Street at 34.8. The title came home.
A Record You Have to Park On
Ask anyone who lives here what the record means and you usually get a shrug with some affection in it. The gradient was there before Guinness, before Jim Mora, before the first bus pulled up on North Road, and it will still be there when whatever comes next has been and gone. The certificate changed the number of people on the footpath. It did not change the street.
What it did do was turn an accident of surveying into an identity. North East Valley is the suburb with the street, Dunedin is the city with the record, and both of those sit on a residential road where somebody is currently trying to get a couch through a front door on a 1 in 2.86 slope.
The steepest street in the world is also somebody’s walk home with the groceries. That is the part the record never quite captures, and the part you notice if you go up early enough to have the footpath to yourself. Stand at the top, look out over the Quarry Gardens, and it is not the gradient that stays with you. It is the letterboxes.