George Street Looking South and the Royal Hotel

Stand mid-town and look south along George Street — Sydney’s main north–south spine — and you’re walking the Tank Stream valley that Macquarie formally named George Street in 1810 (High Street / Spring Row labels before that). Nineteenth-century looking-south plates show a tight commercial wall: hotels, arcades, shopfronts — the street that sold the colony its boots, books and theatre tickets.

On the eastern side between King and Market sat the Royal Hotel, opened 1829 for Barnett Levey, with an attached theatre that from 1832 staged Sydney’s first regular professional performances. Fire took the complex in 1840; it was rebuilt and stayed a George Street fixture until mid-1920s–early-1930s demolition for the Dymocks Building (The Block) — bookselling had already occupied part of the hotel from 1890. So those “looking south” views aren’t just street furniture: they catch a vanished hotel–theatre at the heart of colonial entertainment and retail.

Don’t confuse this Royal with every other Sydney pub of the same name. Caption by direction and building identity — never label today’s Block as the 1829 hotel.