Neighbourhood Snapshot

The ariel photo above shows Lower Fort Street which runs between the approaches to Sydney Harbour Bridge and the wharves of Walsh Bay. A few house numbers will help orientation, and we live beneath the yellow star. What follows is a snapshot of Lower Fort Street from Dawes Point to Ferry Lane.

At left near the Dawes Point end of Lower Fort Street is Milton Terrace, once described as the finest terrace in Sydney. It runs from 1-19 Lower Fort Street. These are big, wide four-storey houses, with some interesting architectural details, including many from the grand 50-foot-wide Milton House, built in the 1820s and still largely intact within numbers seven and nine, including a front door, a serpentine Georgian staircase, fireplace surrounds and hob grates, and many other internal features.

The whole terrace has been run as a series of boarding houses and flats for more than 100 years, and soon the first of these is to be offered for sale on 99-year lease. Number three is getting a final clean-up before the Di Jones marketing begins, and there are a few other properties in this terrace that might soon be offered for sale as well.

Just beyond Milton Terrace is a pair of houses built by Captain Nicholson in 1832. One side was sold on 99-year lease a couple of years ago, and work has been going on apace, recently extending to the exterior where a paint consultant has chosen an adventurous yellow for the exterior walls and a clip-on bathroom has been added.

Inside is some stunning woodwork, and perhaps the interior will be painted incarnadine -- an interesting colour if you look into it.

Here is the view of this pair from the front. The front verandah was added later and is in urgent need of repair, but is Housing NSW about to spend a substantial amount on the half it still maintains? It seems not. The residents on the unsold side are soon to leave and this half might also be offered for sale on a 99-year lease.

This is the beginning of the roadway that once ran behind the houses to the right and down to the wharves of Edwards and Hunter who built our house at number 37 in 1833. Two of the houses in the Morris's Terrace (numbers 25-33 Lower Fort Street and also built in 1833) have been sold on 99-year leases and our new neighbours have moved in. In another of these houses lives a charming resident who has been here for many decades, and we hope to keep her in our neighbourhood. This is the run of houses that includes us, and unfortunately there is no current activity on the renovation front (see previous post), so our snapshot moves further up the street to Palermo Terrace.

A couple of houses in this terrace have been sold on 99-year leases, and some fine restoration of woodwork has been evident in the workshop that has been set up on the ground floor. It must be getting close to finished.

This gracious Regency-style terrace was built by the Flavelle brothers in the early 1850s, and all three properties have been sold by Housing NSW on 99-year leases over the past few years. This terrace is at 57–61 Lower Fort Street.

These are the jewel of our neighbourhood and are going to be the most wonderful homes. The restoration of one of them is to be the subject of a series of stories in the Herald. Here's a link to the first story last weekend...

http://tiny.cc/oszl4

The houses in this terrace are only two rooms deep and this photo shows how much light comes through the floor-to-ceiling windows – such a wonderful solution to housing, so it's a shame Sydney did not get more terraces like this.

Rear view of numbers 57-61. These will look great if the tacked-on verandahs come off and the original verandahs below are restored. Wonder what their plans are?

Next terrace along the street and this is the house undergoing the most work. It includes a delightful attic room a little like our own. Below is a view of this terrace from the front, and the lane at the end is Ferry Lane which marks the official end of our suburb Dawes Point -- surely the smallest suburb in Sydney.

The suburb of Dawes Point begins at Ferry Lane, just to the left of these buildings on Lower Fort Street.












This pair of houses looks like they would be at home in southern USA. Built in the early 1840s and once named Sophocles and Euripides, both have now been sold on 99-year leases and we look forward to watching how these are restored. These are the only houses on the other side of the road to have been offered for sale by Housing NSW, and so they mark the end of this snapshot.