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In the mid-1840s, a man named Charles Henry Kettle was hired by the New Zealand Company to survey the land around the flats and hills at the head of Otago Harbour, and lay out a plan for the streets of a town.

The result included an octagonal area with a street named Moray Place as its perimeter, inside of which was a number of sections with a smaller octagon-shaped area in the middle marked as a reserve.

If he had known how much controversy that small reserve would cause in the ensuing years, perhaps he and the surveyors, Robert Park and William Davison, would have had second thoughts about its designated purpose.

"No other part of Dunedin City has been the subject of so much prolonged public debate as the Octagon," said the Director of Works for the City in a report written 145 years later.

From public outcries of disgust at its appearance and the need for change in the 19th century, to equally vehement outpourings of opposition to any alteration in the late 20th century, the space has always been a focus of attention in one way or another.

The area's status as a reserve was sealed in law in the city's infancy, only six years after organised European settlement began.

Dunedin Public Lands Ordinance, 1854

"It shall not be lawful to erect any building whatever within or upon the centre area of the Square called Moray Place, delineated on the Record Map of the Town of Dunedin, except a parapet wall and railing, or fence, for enclosing the said area, which shall for ever remain otherwise an open area."

This ordinance was put in place in the same year of the first and only real threat to its state as a reserve. The Anglicans had selected the Octagon as the site for their new church. Needless to say, there was a furore when the predominantly Presbyterian community discovered that plans were well underway for construction and the newly elected Provincial Council suggested they look elsewhere.

The name 'Octagon' was not formalised for many years, but was in popular use almost from the beginning of European settlement in 1848.