Curtin Place - Laneways - Little George Street - Sydney - New South Wales

Curtin Place is the southern edge of the Australia Square block — the lane you hit between Hunter and the Seidler tower when the city drops from George Street’s retail roar into service-lane quiet. It was Little George Street until the mid-1960s; City archives file the rename to Curtin Place in 1966–67, for wartime Prime Minister John Curtin (1941–45). The name is one of the better CBD commemorations: a working lane, not a boulevard, for a PM who never got the marble treatment in life.

Under the skyscraper, between this lane and Bond Street, sat the romantically named Robin Hood Place — gone with the Australia Square resumption. Off Curtin Place, Hamilton Street and Little Hunter Street still run as stubs of the older fine-grain grid. Read the whole cluster with Bond Street: printers and tiny places erased for the circular tower (opened 1967), a wartime PM’s name stuck on what remained, and the lower George Street commercial world buried under plaza levels.

It is a short walk and a long lesson in how Sydney renames the scraps after it demolishes the pattern.