Sydney Garden Palace – Macquarie Street – Sydney – Part 7

Part 7 of the Garden Palace scrapbook — same vanished giant, more plates. Barnet’s exhibition hall rose in the Inner Domain for the Sydney International Exhibition (17 September 1879 – 20 April 1880), dome on the skyline between today’s State Library precinct and the Conservatorium. John Young drove the build from early 1879 so the doors could open that September; more than a million visitors walked through before the show closed.

In the early hours of 22 September 1882 fire took the timber palace in about forty minutes — records, art and museum collections with it. Open verdict; arson gossip never proved. Almost nothing stood above ground afterward; a garden and fountain now hint at the old dome footprint on the Botanic Gardens edge. This instalment is another tray of views from the three-year wonder — construction, crowds, aftermath — not a second full essay.

For the longer chronology see Sydney Garden Palace in Pictures. Keep these nineteen images; caption by theme (nave, dome, Domain edge, ruin) rather than inventing photographers without credits.

Garden Palace, Sydney International Exhibition Building — NLA / Flickr Commons (no known copyright restrictions; file date metadata varies — treat as Exhibition-era view).

 

The Garden Palace was a grand exhibition building on Macquarie Street, erected for the 1879 Sydney International Exhibition. Designed by colonial architect James Barnet, it was largely destroyed by fire in 1882, and its former site later became part of the Royal Botanic Gardens.

Sydney Garden Palace - Macquarie Street - Sydney - New South Wales - Part 7