On Botany Road at Waterloo — numbers 103–105 — a neat brick Gothic church still faces the street while metro precinct towers rise around it. Congregational worship started in this neighbourhood in the late 1850s: an early chapel and Sabbath school opened near Buckland Street in 1858, and a later chapel stood on the present lot from the mid-1860s. The building you see now is the substantial church whose foundation stone was laid on 24 November 1883 and which opened for worship in July 1884, the older building kept for a time as a schoolroom.
It is listed as a local heritage item (“Congregational Church Including Interior”) under the City of Sydney LEP. Waterloo Congregational Church Incorporated still appears on the national charities register at this address, and metro planning has repeatedly treated the church lot as an excluded heritage parcel. The 1865 date on older notes refers to the earlier chapel generation — not the present Botany Road façade alone.










No comments:
Post a Comment