Dunedin Ice Stadium

Dunedin Ice Stadium is the city's indoor ice sports facility, at 101 Victoria Road in St Kilda. It houses two sheets of ice and is the home venue of the Dunedin Thunder ice hockey team.

Facilities

The main sheet is the international-sized Corinne Gilkison rink, measuring 60m by 30m. Alongside it is the Caversham Trust curling rink, a dedicated curling sheet completed in 2005 and opened to the public in 2006. Between them the two surfaces support ice hockey, curling, figure skating and public skating sessions.

The stadium has a cafe serving hot food, snacks and cold drinks, and offers function room hire in addition to ice bookings. Bookings and availability are managed through an online scheduling system linked from the stadium website, and the operator handles enquiries covering curling, ice hire, events, birthday parties and general operations.

History

The push for an indoor rink in Dunedin dates to 1975, when Canadian migrant Dr Barrie Berkley convened a public meeting attended by around 30 people to gauge interest. Dunedin's first indoor rink opened in 1984 at Kaikorai Valley.

The current stadium was built in 2004 inside the shell of the former Dunedin Stadium, a building previously used for netball and basketball but largely superseded for those codes by the Edgar Centre. The rink opened in October 2004 at a reported construction cost of $4 million, with the curling sheet added the following year.

Event capability

As a MICE venue Dunedin Ice Stadium is a specialist rather than a general-purpose option. Its value lies in the ice itself: corporate skating or curling sessions, team-building events, club functions, prizegivings and social evenings, with a function room and cafe available to support them. Ice hockey fixtures and competitive curling draw spectators to the venue in their own right.

Organisers should treat it as an activity and social venue rather than a conference centre. Specific function room dimensions, seating capacities and catering arrangements are not published in detail and should be confirmed directly with the stadium. For conventional meeting and conference space, other Dunedin venues will be a better fit, but for an off-site activity with genuine novelty value the ice stadium is one of the few options of its kind in the lower South Island.