The battle for the world's steepest street

Most visitors who huff their way up Baldwin Street assume its title is old news—a record set once, decades ago, and never seriously challenged. In fact, Dunedin first took the title from San Francisco, later lost it to Wales, fought to get it back and won because of a measurement rule most people had never considered.

It is one of the better small-city rivalry stories in the world.

How Dunedin took the title from San Francisco

The story began in the 1980s when Dunedin broadcaster and journalist Jim Mora asked a simple question: which was the steepest street in Dunedin?

Many people assumed it was View Street in the central city. Mora suspected that some of the roads climbing the hills of North East Valley might be steeper, so he contacted the Dunedin City Council.

The answer was Baldwin Street.

Mora then checked the Guinness Book of Records. At that time, the title was associated with two of San Francisco’s famously steep streets—Filbert Street and 22nd Street—with gradients of approximately 31%.

Baldwin Street, with a gradient of roughly 35% at its steepest point, was clearly steeper.

Mora began corresponding with Guinness and gathering evidence to support Dunedin’s claim. On 9 April 1985, a story appeared on the local television programme South Tonight, declaring Baldwin Street to be not only Dunedin’s steepest street but potentially the steepest residential street in the world.

In 1987, Guinness World Records officially recognised Baldwin Street. A short residential street in North East Valley had taken the title from the famous hills of San Francisco.

San Francisco had cable cars, international fame and countless photographs of vehicles climbing its dramatic hills. Dunedin had careful measurements, a determined journalist and a street that was simply steeper.

An accidental record

Baldwin Street exists because of a planning mistake nobody bothered to fix. When Dunedin was laid out in the 19th century, the street grid was drawn up by planners back in London who had never seen the hills they were mapping. Instead of curving roads around the terrain, they simply overlaid a tidy grid — and where that grid landed on a near-vertical slope, the road was built to match anyway. Baldwin Street was the most extreme result: a straight residential street with a gradient of roughly 35% at its steepest point.

Guinness World Records recognised it as the world's steepest street in 1987, and for more than three decades that was simply accepted as fact. Dunedin built a small tourism industry and a couple of much-loved local traditions around it — an annual charity run up and down the street, and the "Jaffa Race," where thousands of the small round chocolate lollies are released to roll down the hill.

The challenge from Wales

In 2019, a resident of Harlech, a seaside town in North Wales, changed all that. Gwyn Headley had been driving down a street called Ffordd Pen Llech near his home for years when, one day, his car's anti-lock brakes locked up and it slid several metres down the hill. Curious, he looked up the street's official ranking and found it wasn't recognised at all. He decided to fix that.

After a proper survey, Ffordd Pen Llech came in at a gradient of 37.45% — over two percentage points steeper than Baldwin Street. In July 2019, Guinness made it official: after 32 years, Dunedin had lost the title.

Dunedin fights back

The response from Dunedin was equal parts serious and gloriously petty. The city's mayor at the time, Dave Cull, joked that if Wales really did have a steeper street, Dunedin would "just have to arrange one of our periodic earthquakes and tilt Baldwin a bit more." One local student proposed a more literal fix: turning up with bags of concrete to pour down the street and steepen it by hand. Neither happened.

What did happen was more effective. A Dunedin surveyor named Toby Stoff crowdfunded a trip to Wales, theodolite in hand, to properly measure Ffordd Pen Llech himself. His argument was simple: Ffordd Pen Llech curves, and Guinness had measured its gradient along the inside of the bend — the steepest possible line, but not a fair comparison to Baldwin Street, which runs dead straight. Stoff proposed the fairer method was measuring along a street's centre line.

Guinness agreed. In April 2020, it revised its methodology and re-measured both streets from their centre lines. Under the new rules, Ffordd Pen Llech's gradient dropped to 28.6%, while Baldwin Street held steady at 34.8%. The title returned to Dunedin, where it remains today.

Why it's worth knowing before you visit

Baldwin Street will always draw a crowd for the photo at the bottom and the burn in your calves at the top. But knowing the backstory changes the visit — this isn't just a steep street, it's a street with a hard-won trophy and a small, stubborn city that went and got a surveyor rather than let a technicality settle it. It's exactly the kind of local story that turns a five-minute photo stop into one of the better anecdotes from the day.

Come and see it for yourself—and hear the rest of the story—on a Dunedin City Highlights Tour with Fantail Tours.