One man's mission to record New Zealand's 'mile' signs

After the forced Dave Britten out of his job as an aircraft engineer, he embarked on an unusual journey.

Purely for his own amusement, he took on the task of photographing every sign in the South Island with the word Mile on it.

After the lockdowns, Britten and his semi-retired partner, Nicki Carter, decided to go house and pet sitting around the South Island.

“It all started when we were on the West Coast for a couple of months and we kept passing the same signs for bridges and creeks between Barrytown and Greymouth, seven, nine, 13, 14-mile creeks,” he said. “It just amused me.”

He began photographing the West Coast signs, and from there the project expanded.

When the couple spent some time in Wānaka, Carter began earnestly researching all the place, road and creek names with the word mile in them.

They took day trips on Britten’s motorbike to see signs around Wānaka, and later from Dunedin to tick all the Southern signs off.

When he saw a article on , he was surprised he hadn’t heard of it and returned to the West Coast to photograph it. His final trip was a loop of the top of the South Island.

He now has almost 80 signs for roads, reserves, rivers, beaches and creeks with numbers ranging from half to 25.

“Quite a few are repeated on features that are completely different and many miles apart,” he said.

He said most signs were accurate, including an old relic from the stage coach days – a milestone near Arthur’s Pass which marked 57 miles to Springfield.

It was covered in moss, behind a guardrail in some bush.

The sign that perplexed him most was for Five Mile Rd in Gimmerburn, Central Otago.

“It isn’t five miles to anywhere,” he said.

Britten said he enjoyed the experience and was hoping to create a poster montage of the signs.

“It’s good just going for a ride to track down some signs. I really enjoyed it. It was good fun finding all these interesting and weird signs,” he said.

“New Zealand went metric 50 years ago, but here they still are.”