Baldwin Street, in Dunedin, New Zealand, is located in the residential suburb of North East Valley, 2.2 miles (3.5 km) northeast of Dunedin’s central business district. Guinness World Records calls it the steepest street in the world, meaning no street gains more altitude in 10 horizontal metres (33 ft), measured along the street’s centreline.
A straight street slightly under 350 metres (1,150 ft) long, Baldwin Street runs east from the valley of the Lindsay Creek up the side of Signal Hill towards Opoho, rising from 30 m (98 ft) above sea level at its junction with North Road to 100 m (330 ft) above sea level at the top, an average slope of slightly more than 1:5. The lower reaches are only moderately steep, and the surface is asphalt, but the upper reaches are steeper and surfaced in concrete (200 m or 660 ft long) for ease of maintenance (bitumen—in either chip seal or asphalt—would flow down the slope on a warm day) and for safety in Dunedin’s frosty winters.
The 161.2-metre-long (529 ft) top section climbs 47.2 metres (155 ft) vertically, an average gradient of 1:3.41. At its maximum, about 70 metres (230 ft) from the top, the slope of Baldwin Street is about 1:2.86 (19° or 35%); in 2.86 metres (9.4 ft) travelled horizontally, the elevation changes by 1 metre (3.3 ft).
For cars it is a dead-end street, but Baldwin Street is linked across the top by Buchanan Street, a footpath following an otherwise unformed (i.e. unpaved) road linking it with Calder Avenue and Arnold Street, which are unformed in their upper reaches where Baldwin is steepest. The streets running parallel to Baldwin are all steep: Arnold Street (1:3.6 or 27.77%), Dalmeny Street (1:3.7 or 27%), and Calder Avenue (1:5.4 or 13%).
The UK’s steepest road.
Ffordd Pen Llech is a public road in the town of Harlech which lies within Snowdonia National Park, North Wales. It was once considered the steepest street in the world, although that title reverted to the previous holder Baldwin Street on 8 April 2020.
The street is a two-way single-track road for the majority of its length. To avoid problems with vehicles meeting on the steepest part of the slope and being unable to restart, the lower portion of the road is a one-way descent.
From 15 July 2019 until 8 April 2020, the street was officially named the “World’s Steepest Street” by Guinness World Records, a title previously given to Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand. Guinness measures the steepest road based on the steepest 10-metre section of the road (there are no buildings on this 10-metre section of Ffordd Pen Llech).
On 8 April 2020, Guinness announced that Baldwin Street was reinstated as the world’s steepest street after determining that the best practice to calculate a street gradient is to take the measurement from the centreline. The new measurements found the street in Dunedin had a gradient of 34.8% while Ffordd Pen Llech’s was calculated to be 28.6%.
Please note, this page was correct when written in February 2025.