Councillor Andy Foster will show Wellingtonians where their brand new inner-city park is.

Wellington City Council has snapped up a forgotten historic park in the central city that was so obscure councillors became lost searching for it.

Flagstaff Hill is accessible only through a labyrinth of walking tracks between Willis St and The Terrace, and councillors admit most Wellingtonians would have never heard of the place.

"It's not the easiest place to find, you access it through some back paths that have some zig zags," Andy Foster said on-site on Thursday.

ASHTEN MACDONALD/ FAIRFAX NZ The hidden inner-city park that Wellington City Council have recently purchased at Flagstaff Hill.

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* Who will buy Flagstaff Hill?

On Wednesday night, the council voted unanimously to buy the 1630 metre square block of land from private developers, with an eye to turning it into a more widely used space.

Foster said he was familiar with the site but admitted some other councillors who voted to buy Flagstaff had struggled to place it on a map.

Several got lost on their way to an on-site meeting.

It is understood the council paid just $150,000 for the site, which has a rateable value of $600,000.

Foster said the plans for developing the park were vague at this stage, but it was hoped more could be done to recognise its historical significance and make people aware it existed.

"Hopefully it becomes a park that sort of sits in the middle of the neighbourhood."

The reserve, which can only be reached on foot from Percival St and Allenby Tce, has strong historical associations with the early European settlement period.

After the Wairau Affray, a bloody confrontation between Maori and Pakeha near Blenheim in 1843, settlers established a series of flagstaffs in Wellington to warn of impending Maori attack.

The first recorded flag was raised on the site in 1857, but it is not known who raised it.

The land was first referred to as Flagstaff Hill in 1891 and the name has remained in use since.

A group of cottages surrounding the site are some of the oldest original cottages in the central city. And while it had been passed between many private owners, including New Zealand Breweries and Massey University, the site has been looked after by the council since 1972.

The owners iuntil now were developers Mike and Gay O'Sullivan, who had plans and consent to build 12 apartments as part of their growing apartment complex behind St George Hotel on Willis St.

Mike O'Sullivan said on Thursday that he was happy to "gift" the site to Wellington, providing the council kept it as park. The "nominal" price had been used to offset the development fees for his other building projects, he said.

"Wellington has been very good to myself and my wife and we wanted to give something back."

Council natural environment portfolio leader Helene Ritchie said Flagstaff Hill was a "green oasis" in one of the most densely populated parts of the city.

"It's a great quiet spot for lunch on a fine day. It could also be a performance or outdoor theatre space. Parts of it could be turned into a community garden."

Foster said one of the first changes could be erecting an actual flag. "The flagstaff is being represented by a dead branch, I think we can do better than that."