From a sad and maybe illegal nod to the last of the city’s true suburban malls to a long overdue artisanal upstart, this is the definitive list of malls in Hamilton, the city of the future.

This is the fourth in the Malls of New Zealand series, where we rank the malls in major centres.

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Hamilton, as my mother likes to tell me, is the fastest-growing city in New Zealand. A fountain of knowledge who dwells in the city once known as the fountain city, my mum is usually right, but before pitching a ranking of malls in the city of the future, I fact-checked her. According to population estimates and projections data released in February, Hamilton grew 3.4% while Tauranga, another city on the rise, grew 2.5%. Census 2023 data on regional growth actually reveals that the Auckland region is the fastest grower, but Waikato is right up there. As of July, it was also still experiencing economic growth while the rest of the country sunk into recession. As a region isn’t a city, let’s call my mother right enough to necessitate one of the city’s prodigal daughters (me) slinking back to the Tron on a sunny Tuesday to assess its malls.

The criteria outlined by Joseph Harper in his ranking of Christchurch malls is now codified Spinoff and mall-ranking lore. A mall:

• must be a shared indoor space for food and retail, where one might put a Christmas tree.
• must have toilets.
• must have a car park.
• must have a food court (or “multiple food options”).

5. Glenview Shopping Centre, 0.8 of a mall

Straight off the bat, the fourth item on Harper’s bullet-proof list created some uncertainty about whether to include the Glenview Shopping Centre. Your food options are sushi, Golden Bell takeaway and a bakery. While the elders of Glenview (it was 11am on a Tuesday) looked to be enjoying the bakery, can three stand as a definition of “multiple”?

The expressed preference of the people I ran into while doing my mall investigation was that I did not include Glenview. “Oh no,” they said as I wondered how running into people I knew (a pleasure) could still be happening in the country’s fastest-growing city. I drove past my old childhood home and the home of my grandparents to get to the centre I used to visit with them. Given it ticks all boxes, and if we lean into some seasonal generosity on “multiple food options”, nostalgia has prevailed. Sadly, being slightly weepy about my childhood as I pulled into the car park did not help its place in this ranking at all.

It has a large outdoor sun trap of a car park and parking was not difficult to find. Entering, one half of the mall is the New World supermarket, which gives it some local utility and provides a reason for it to keep limping on. The other side is a collection of shops that includes a key cutter, a stationery store, a mysterious shop known only as Shop No. 7, St Vincent de Paul and Habitat for Humanity op shops,  a barber, an Indian supermarket, and an accountant’s office. I may have missed one “centre” of some other description and possibly the advertised physio, but that is basically all the shops. I went into the St Vincent de Paul op shop and can recommend it as a stop for some secondhand holiday books.

Glenview was once the site of one of New Zealand’s first shopping malls, Big ‘A’ Plaza, which opened in 1969. Located at the southern end of a city that has largely expanded northward, the current-day shopping centre is sadly tired and dark. It might more accurately be described as a standalone indoor arcade from an era when needs were simpler, and small suburban malls perfectly fulfilled them.

4. Centre Place

For teens in the 90s and 2000s, Centre Place was where you went to buy CDs, get McD’s and shop the golden triangle of going out clothes. Bootleg pants from Glassons, a two-tone iridescent boob tube from Principals and clogs from Wild Pair were bought to be shared around with friends and worn on wild nights out in the city’s other golden triangle.

Viewed with fresh eyes, Centre Place is surprisingly light and airy. It has very high ceilings and glass inserts in the roof. It has a perfectly adequate food court, Lido and Hoyts cinemas and a multi-level above-ground car park. I got easy parking on the third storey at 1pm on a Tuesday and enjoyed an hour of free parking. A train regularly travels beneath the mall, which can both be felt and heard. The toilets were clean. There were queues, however, which would normally suggest busyness, but in this instance, suggests an insufficient number of toilets. These are the things both novel and mall-basic about Centre Place.

Glassons remains an anchor tenant in the same spot it’s been in since the bootleg pants era of the 90s. There’s also a Jacqui E, a Rodd and Gunn and a collection of sportswear shops. You could definitely whip around and do a Christmas shop here, but it really doesn’t offer a lot more than clothing, gifts, food and entertainment. It’s a main street mall where a lot of the utility tenants, like telcos, banks, supermarkets, Kmarts and Warehouses, are based in standalone retail areas elsewhere on the main street or nearby if they haven’t moved entirely to the north of the city.

Centre Place’s lunch started to get chomped at when The Base, a behemoth retail hub in the city’s north, opened in 2005. Centre Place actually swallowed another mall, Downtown Plaza, and a street between 2010 and 2013, but unfortunately, this extension hasn’t saved it. The mall teens once flocked to now stands as a testament to the way time can freeze when customers depart.

3. Chartwell Shopping Centre

This mall used to be called Chartwell Square and now calls itself “chartwell” in very pedestrian and unassuming lowercase font. It used to have an exterior that I always thought looked edible, like chocolate or caramel bars stuck to its outside. These days, it’s far more ordinary.

It’s akin to Centre Place in its offering but with the advantage of being suburban and therefore housing a supermarket and some banks and telcos. It beats Centre Place on that basis and, because by the time I got there, it was 27 degrees outside, and the mall air-conditioning was very welcome. Car parking was easy, and after running into a friend, I learned that what I thought was new undercover car parking was actually quite old. I nabbed my usual parking spot (circa 20 years ago in a much shittier car) right outside the entrance.

It’s a pretty standard mall. A long-ish concourse with an upstairs and a downstairs. A Santa was waiting for kids to come and get photos with him. There’s a food court on the second level offering everything you’d expect, a Woolworths beneath it and a Farmers.  It’s got brand name clothing retailers like H&M and then a collection of lesser-known gift and clothing retailers. Malls of a certain era increasingly seem to be tenanted in this way and there weren’t any empty shops.

It is clean, quiet, tidy and well-decorated for Christmas. Like so many malls, there is a calendar shop selling at least four firefighter calendars. Never let these taonga of mall life die, even if we all have our diaries unwillingly uploaded to our brains by AI overlords. There’s free parking for four hours. It is a perfectly fine mall for where it is and, as one of the four proper malls in Hamilton, it holds its own enough to kick on for a while yet.

2. Made, Grey Street

It would be easy to slip into some reverse snobbery about Made, a self-described “urban precinct of refurbished buildings that provide an opportunity to house some of Waikato’s most creative makers and doers”, but honestly, I am glad Hamilton has grown to the point of accommodating a spectrum of retail experiences. Those behind the venture might even cringe at the idea of it being classified as a mall, but it meets all criteria.

Made is on Grey Street in Hamilton East. It faces ONTO the mighty Waikato River. Finding a spot that provides an outdoor eating area and a deck overlooking the water feels positively magical in a city that has mysteriously rejected facing, what I believe to be, the right way for years.

The lower level has Volare Bread, an excellent local bakery that makes delicious sausage rolls. There’s a coffee/smoothie/bowl place that successfully makes a iced matcha latte that rivals any you might get in Auckland, both in quality and price, and an Oat Bros, a small food vendor that specialises in, well, oats. The lower level then expands into fresh produce, eggs and a butcher. There are locally made gifts to buy downstairs and on the mezzanine floor and what looks like a gorgeous wine bar. Turn a corner and you hit the Mess Hall or food court. I was personally thrilled to see a vendor selling what looked like classic mall butter chicken alongside more “upmarket” fare like Burger Burger and Crack Chicken. That is where you’ll find the outdoor deck and down a spiral staircase, outdoor tables, coffee roaster Grey Roasting Co, and “the Sheds”.

There is car parking, and in keeping with some revitalisation of the lanes off Grey Street, you walk through to it via a lane and pass a couple of murals.

My dad reliably informed me there is more parking at the site of the old Eastside Tavern (RIP). It’s delightful, and while it’s not a true “mall”, it’s been beautifully done and based on chatter from all those I  know in the city, something people generally feel proud of having. A pleasant number two.

1. Te Awa at The Base

I need to confess that I didn’t realise Te Awa was not The Base and that The Base was not Te Awa. It’s been a while since I stopped and looked around the north of Hamilton, and before this ranking, I had not set foot in Te Awa despite thinking I had after one trip to the Noel Leeming years ago. It turns out Te Awa is the mall at The Base. The Noel Leeming I visited is just at The Base, the small retail kingdom that has taken over a large chunk of land in the city’s northern suburb of Te Rapa.

As referenced in poor old Centre Place’s review, The Base had become synonymous with the death of the central city. For that reason, when you mention it, it elicits a kind of begrudging respect from locals. It’s hard to escape the reality that a bit like Albany in Auckland, The Base is not only home to a very good mall in Te Awa, but every single big box retailer you can think of. You do not “drive into The Base”, you turn into the many new streets that came to be when it first opened.

The Base sits on a 29-hectare block of land that belonged to Waikato-Tainui. It was taken from them before the second world war by the Crown and became the Te Rapa Air Force Base, which then closed in 1992. The land was returned as part of the Waikato-Tainui raupatu settlement.

The Base is a joint venture between Tainui Group Holdings and Kiwi Property Group. As such, and in as much as a mall can do this, it recognises the land on which it is built and tangata whenua. At its entrance is an impressive pou, Te Koohaoo te Ngira (The Eye of the Needle), representing the words of King Pootatau Te Wherowhero. “Kotahi te koowhao o te ngira e kuhuna atu ai te miro maa, te miro pango, te miro whero.”

There is a taonga trail through the mall and the roof, which floods the main concourse of Te Awa with light, uses a niho taniwha pattern.

These are fairly unique features within malls in New Zealand, but overall, I’d say Te Awa is akin to Sylvia Park, the first of the “new” malls to attempt something different and more expansive than your bog-standard mall.

Its food court opens out to an outdoor area, and while it doesn’t offer anything beyond the ordinary, outdoor space at a mall still feels novel. It has a full slate of retail with more than 150 stores. Car parking was easy, and it is also very accessible by bus.

Te Awa is big and unique enough to still be considered a bit different. It ticks all the boxes. Te Awa at The Base is Hamilton’s best mall.

A earlier version of this article hubristically and incorrectly stated that the Big A Plaza in Glenview was New Zealand’s first mall. That honour belongs to Lynn Mall.

This is the fourth in the Malls of New Zealand series, where we rank the malls in major centres. Next week: we head to Dunedin.