Khyber Pass Road, New Zealand

A watercolour by John Kinder showing Khyber Pass Road, looking south to Ōhinerau / Mount Hobson (circa 1850s)

The bicycle club of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre riding on Khyber Pass Road in October 1896

Khyber Pass began life as a dirt track, during the early settlement of Auckland in the 1840s.[1] As the road was seen as a dangerous frontier, it was named after the Khyber Pass in modern-day Pakistan, which at the time was glamorised as the frontier of British India.[2][3] The road, along with Great South Road, was a part of the route used by soldiers travelling south during the Invasion of the Waikato in the 1860s.[4] The spelling Kyber Pass was commonly used, up until the early 1940s.[5][6]

The part of the road close to Newmarket was known as Hobson's Bridge, referring to an old wooden bridge that existed on modern-day Davis Crescent, which crossed Hobson's Creek, a former waterway.[7] The road was the southern border of the township of Auckland in 1852, so that an ordinance stopping loose cattle could be applied to a larger area.[8][9]

During the late 1850s and 1860s, the land adjacent to Khyber Pass was subdivided and sold as suburban housing, including sections such as the Kyber Pass Village[10][11] and Kyber Pass Estate.[12][13]

The area became a centre for brewers in the mid-19th century, due to the presence of a natural spring.[4][14] The Captain Cook Inn opened by Thomas Hancock on the road in 1859. Originally brewing beer just for the tavern, by 1862 the brewery had become a commercial venture for Hancock.[14] Richard Seccombe opened a brewery opposite the Inn in 1861 called the Great Northern Brewery, later known as Lion Brewery.[14]

In 1872, the Auckland City Council purchased land on Khyber Pass, where water reservoirs and pumping stations were established.[15]

The Captain Cook Inn was demolished in 1968.[14] The last brewery site on the road was the Lion Brewery, which sold its premises in 2008, and was later redeveloped as a satellite campus of the University of Auckland.[4][14]

• Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an Anglican church built in 1881 to replace the church that was a part of the Anglican section of the Symonds Street Cemetery.[16]
• Grafton railway station, a railway station on the Western Line opened in 2010, replacing the earlier Boston Road railway station to the southwest.[17]
• Number Four Khyber Reservoir, a water reservoir at the corner of Symonds Street and Khyber Pass.
• St David's Presbyterian Church, a church which opened in 1927 as a World War I memorial and Presbyterian church,[18] and closed in 2020.[19]
• St Peter's College, a Catholic boys' secondary school opened in 1939.[20]
• The University of Auckland Newmarket Campus, is an engineering and science campus in the former Lion Brewery site.[21]

• 
  Church of the Holy Sepulchre
• 
  The Khyber Reservoir
• 
  St Peter's College, looking south along Mountain Road across the Khyber Pass Road intersection.
• 
  St David's Presbyterian Church
• 
  The Lion Brewery, which was converted into a University of Auckland campus in 2016