Bond Street – Laneways – Sydney – New South Wales

Bond Street is still on the CBD grid — northern edge of Australia Square — but most of the buildings that made it a street were swept for Harry Seidler’s circular tower and plaza, opened 1967. What you walk now is a name and a frontage; what you have lost is a honeycomb of small shops, printers and publishers that filled the early twentieth century.

That is the Bond Street worth remembering. Sydney Ure Smith and Harry Julius ran Smith & Julius commercial art studios here (famously at 24 Bond Street); Ure Smith’s Art in Australia and later The Home made the street a node in Sydney’s print and design world. Photographer Max Dupain also worked from Bond Street studios in that same creative cluster. This was not a grand processional street — it was a working lane of presses, blocks and copy — until the Australia Square resumption flattened the fine grain.

Stand at Bond and George and read the absence. Seidler’s tower is the landmark; the missing printers are the history.