Most Aucklanders have been inside The Civic. Far fewer have been inside it empty.

That’s the thing the tour gives you, and it’s why it’s worth the ticket: an hour in one of the most beautiful rooms in the country with the lights up, the seats empty, and someone who loves the building telling you why it looks the way it does.

Where it starts

The tour begins in the outer lobby, inside the building, but before the doors that take you through to the theatre proper. You sit down. There’s a short, properly researched introduction to how the place came to exist: what this part of Auckland was like at the time, the politics around the site, what the city was thinking in the late 1920s. There are visual aids. If you’re interested in Auckland’s history, this section alone justifies the ticket.

Our guide had clearly worked at The Civic for years, and it showed. Genuinely knowledgeable, obviously fond of the place, and good company for an hour, which is most of what makes a tour like this work.

Then the doors open

The first proper look at the interior is a moment, even if you think you know the building.

From there you go up the grand stairs, and this is where the architectural detail comes into focus: the design decisions, what’s original, what’s been restored and how.

The thing that genuinely surprised me: the elephants. I had no idea there were so many of them in this building. Once you start noticing them you cannot stop, and there is a reason they are there. I’ll leave that one to your guide.

The other thing is the sheer density of it. Detail on every surface, carved and moulded and painted, all of it lit in deep jewel colours: reds, blues, gold catching the light wherever it falls. It is unapologetically lavish and nobody has tried to tone it down. You could stand in one spot turning slowly for ten minutes and still be finding things.

Upstairs, and then behind the scenes

Up the grand stairs there’s a colonnade with café tables, and the detailing close enough to look at.

Then the back of house. Service corridors, the working parts of the building, the routes staff take: how a venue like this actually runs, day to day, and how it would have run then.

You come out at the top of the house, right up in the gods, with the projection room windows just above you and the whole auditorium dropping away below. Then you walk down through the empty seating, with time to stop and take photographs on the way.

The stage

After that: the green rooms, and the other working areas for cast and crew.

And then you walk out onto the stage.

That’s the bit. Very few people ever stand on that stage, and looking out at an empty house from where the performers stand is genuinely strange and rather moving. All those seats, all that space, and the room absolutely silent.

Bring your camera. But take a moment before you take the photo.

I found myself wondering whether anyone had ever asked to sing. A verse, a few lines, something small, just to hear what it sounds like from up there. I didn’t ask, and nobody in our group tried it.

The last twenty minutes

You come back around and sit in the stalls, and the curtain comes down. That alone is worth being there for.

Then up to the boxes, and they turn on the ceiling.

If you’ve only ever seen it during a show, with your attention on the stage, you haven’t really seen it. The whole group went quiet, then didn’t. There was proper oohing and aahing, from adults who’d walked in an hour earlier being polite about a building.

No photograph does it justice. That one you have to see in the room.

Who it’s for

Anyone who likes buildings, old Auckland, or theatre. Anyone who’s walked past the Civic a hundred times and never gone in. It’s a good rainy-day option, and a very good one for visiting family who’ve run out of things to do.

Children 14 and under need an adult with them, and everyone needs their own ticket. It’s a talking-and-walking tour rather than a hands-on one, so it suits older kids better than small ones.