I wrote up the city laneways one at a time in March 2020. They’re all together on this one page now, starting with Abercrombie Lane.
Abercrombie Lane
Abercrombie Lane is one of the George Street slits that still feels like it might tip you into the old creek line. On the corner stands George Patterson House — the 1880s warehouse later famous as an advertising castle — gutted by fire in January 1996 and rebuilt into the Establishment hotel complex with enough blackened fabric left that the bar still reads as a ruin with good lighting.
Walk the lane and the Tank Stream imaginary kicks in: Collins’s 1802 description of the fresh-water run through the wood fits it well, but the open creek is long gone into a drain under the towers.
Abercrombie Lane - Laneways - Sydney - NSW
On The Corner Of Abercrombie Lane Is The George Patterson Building, Refurbished As An Upmarket Bar After A Fire That Gutted The Building In 1996. This Building Retains Many Original Features, Including Some Atmospheric Fire Damaged Walls. Walking Down Abercrombie Lane It Is Easy To Imagine That You Are Heading For The Tank Stream.
"The Spot Chosen For The Settlement Was At The Head Of A Cove, Near The Run Of Fresh Water Which Stole Silently Along Through A Very Nice Thick Wood, The Stillness Of Which Had Then, For The First Time Since Creation, Been Interrupted.."
- David Collins - Account Of An English Colony Of New South Wales 1802
When The Water Supply Became Inadequate, Convicts Were Set To Work Digging Holding Tanks Into The Watercourse, And So It Became Known As The Tank Stream. Today The Stream Runs Silently Through A City Drain Below The Pavements.
Rowe Street
Rowe Street is the laneway Sydney still argues about after most of it vanished. It ran between Pitt and Castlereagh — first Brougham Place, renamed in 1875 for architect Thomas Rowe — and by the mid-twentieth century it was the city’s pocket of galleries, studios, hat shops, record bins and espresso bars. If Sydney ever had a European-chic slit street, this was the one people meant.
Nearly all of it came down in 1973 for Harry Seidler’s MLC Centre (1973–76). A stub off Pitt Street is what you can still walk. Hotel Australia and the old Theatre Royal died in the same redevelopment storm.
No Street In Sydney Has Had More Words Written About It Than Rowe Street. By The Early 20th Century Its Fine Run Of Terrace Houses Was Being Converted Into Small Shops & Galleries, & Rowe Street Was The Closest Thing Sydney Had To European Chic.
Upstairs Rooms Were Used As Artists Studios, & The Commercial Notanda Gallery Was A Gathering Place For The Artistic Community. In Adjoining Shops You Could Borrow A Book Or Buy An Elegant Hat.
Many People Remember Window Shopping For The Latest In Interior Design And Parisian Frocks, Buying Some Music At Rowe Street Records Or Enjoying A Bohemian Espresso At Horton's Gallery.
The Street Remains, But The Buildings Were Demolished To Make Way For The Construction Of The MLC Centre In The 1970's. Many People Still Mourn Its Passing, & It Continues To Be Cited As A Cautionary Tale Against Overdevelopment & Wholesale Destruction Of The Fine Grain Fabric Of The City.
Penfold Place and Hosking Place
Penfold Place and Hosking Place are the printworks laneways behind Pitt Street — short cuts that still smell faintly of stationery even when the fit-out is glass. W.C. Penfold & Co., one of Sydney’s longest-running printing and stationery houses, bought into a Pitt Street printing site here in 1866 (a press tradition on the block from the 1830s) and in 1912 took the multi-storey Hosking House behind for an expanded plant. The lanes were the firm’s private circulation and everyone else’s rat-run between the bigger streets.
Hosking Place commemorates John Hosking, Sydney’s first elected mayor (1842–43). The mayoralty did not end gently: the 1840s commercial crash wrecked his finances and he had to step aside — a useful reminder that civic honour and solvency were not the same thing in early municipal Sydney. A Hosking mansion stood at Pitt Street and Martin Place. It was lost to fire around 1890 and the Metropolitan Hotel took its place.
W C Penfold & Co Is One Of Sydney's Oldest Firms. In 1866 Penfold Bought Out A Printing Business That Had Been On This Pitt Street Site Since 1830, & In 1912 The Firm Bought The Eight Storey Hosking House In Hosking Lane Behind, For An Extended Printworks.
These Private Laneways Have Served The Firm, & Acted As A Short Cut For Locals For All This Time.
John Hosking Was Sydney's First Elected Mayor. He Had To Step Down From This Position When He Was Declared Bankrupt In The 1840's Depression. If Only He Could See His Piece Of Real Estate Now.
Hosking’s Mansion Was Built On the Corner Of Pitt Street And Martin Place On The North Eastern
corner.
It Was Destroyed By Fire In 1890
The Mansion Became The Site For The Metropolitan Hotel.
Palings Lane and Ash Street
Slip off George Street into Palings Lane and the CBD drops its voice. The restaurants and bars feel new; the name is not. The lane led through to the Palings music warehouse on Ash Street the 1880s building associated with W.H. Paling & Co., the firm that sold Sydney its pianos and sheet music when a colonial drawing-room was incomplete without both.
William Henry Paling (1825–1895) arrived from the Netherlands in 1853, taught, concertised, and built a retail empire that hopped from Wynyard Square timber sheds to Barrack Street, a George Street showroom, an Ash Street premises in 1880, and finally the long-running George Street flagship. Upper rooms of the music warehouses traditionally housed teachers of music and dance, and artists’ studios — a vertical village of practice rooms above the shop floor. The lane still points at that story even when the fit-out is all polished concrete and natural wine.
Ash Street itself is one of those short CBD spines that collected clubs, parties and back-of-house addresses (including, for a stretch, Liberal Party headquarters). Walk Palings Lane as a music-history shortcut between George and Ash.
The Elegant Complex Of Up Market Restaurants, Pools, Bars And Spas On George Street Is Entered Through Narrow Palings Lane, Which Despite Its Very Contemporary Feeling, Has Been on Or Close To Here For A Long Time. It Was Named Because It Led Through To The Large 1880's Palings Building In Ash Street. W H Paling Was A Musical entrepreneur Who Imported & Eventually Manufactured Pianos And Sheet Music. Upper Floor Rooms Were Rented Out To Teachers Of Music And Dance, & As Artist's Studios. Ash Street Also Housed The Headquarters Of The Liberal Party Of Australia For Many Years
York Lane
York Lane runs as a long north–south service cut behind York Street’s commercial wall — one of Sydney’s longest laneways. Just before Barrack Street the story gets interesting: on one side, remnants of the old warehouse backs that once served the western CBD’s maritime trading strip; on the other, early residential conversions from the 1980s, when a few Sydneysiders started sleeping in the city again instead of only commuting into it.
Those warehouse rears belong to the same family as the York / Barrack / Clarence street stores — places like Pinnacle House (2–6 Barrack Street) originally opened cart docks onto York Lane. Walk it as working Sydney: goods in from Darling Harbour and the Quay, paper and softgoods out to George Street shops, then a late-century twist when apartments claimed the upper floors. Pair with Wynyard Lane next door in the old barracks precinct — together they are the city’s unfinished business, still carrying trucks while the towers pretend the laneways are optional.
Wynyard Lane
At first glance Wynyard Lane is pure back-of-house: loading docks, car-park entries, the rear ends of York and Carrington Street businesses. Look again with a barracks map in your head. Until the 1840s this whole precinct was military — the George Street / Wynyard Barracks and parade ground (Barrack Square), from which the New South Wales Corps once marched on Government House in 1808. When the troops shifted to Victoria Barracks, Paddington, in 1848, the old barracks land was subdivided; the open square that remained became Wynyard Square (now Wynyard Park), named for Major-General Edward Buckley Wynyard, commander of British forces in the Australian colonies from the late 1840s.
The lane inherits the same name. Small warehouses and a hotel took over parts of the former military ground from the 1840s — and even a service lane keeps ghosts of street-facing hospitality. Today’s Wynyard is a transport interchange; Wynyard Lane is the leftover seam from when the army left and the city grid moved in.
Curtin Place
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.
Bond Street
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.
Tank Stream Way
The full history of the stream itself is here: The Tank Stream – Sydney.
Tank Stream Way Was Once Part Of Hamilton Street Which Ran Between Bridge And Hunter Streets, Named After Hamilton's Biscuit Factory. Most Of It Disappeared Underneath The Australia Square Development, Leaving Two Remnant Laneways, And This Section Was Renamed In 1981. In Bridge Lane, Once The Site Of The Town’s First Lumber Yards, Look For The Old Warehouse Doorway, Now The Entrance To The Establishment Hotel. As Late As The 1860s There Was Still Vacant Land Sliced Between The Cottages In This Area, But By The End Of The 19th Century It Had Become A Favoured Location for Warehouses, Including Several Tea Merchants Stores.
Dalley Street, Queens Place and Charlotte Place
What’s in a name? Dalley Street, down in the Tank Stream warren between George and Pitt, was Queen’s Place (and Queen’s Court) until 1905, when it was renamed for William Bede Dalley — barrister, orator, native-born politician, and briefly Acting Premier. Across George Street the aligned continuation was Charlotte Place, named for Queen Charlotte, consort of George III; that stretch is Grosvenor Street now.
This was never a grand civic axis. It was part of the tangle of tiny lanes and courtyards that grew along the Tank Stream between the “official” frontages of George and Pitt — the sort of ground where water, drains, and small dealers shared the same narrow air. Standing in Dalley Street today you are still in that logic: short, hemmed-in, and carrying three centuries of renamed loyalty — from a Georgian queen to a Catholic statesman the city actually liked.
Underwood Street
You would not guess it from the office towers, but Underwood Street is wet ground pretending to be a city lane. This was the mouth of the Tank Stream — the creek that decided where Sydney sat — and in 1798 emancipist shipwright James Underwood laid down what Dictionary of Sydney calls the colony’s first commercial shipyard here. Keels went into the estuary; the shoreline has since been filled, bridged and built over until the original waterfront feels like a rumour. That is the point of the street: the water moved, the name stayed.
Underwood’s grant ran from George Street through to the stream. Before 1807 he had already reclaimed extra yard space into the estuary, then raised a flat-roofed Regency house with a roof walk looking back to Sydney Cove, plus stores. From this pocket came the sloops Contest and Diana, the brig Governor King, and the near-200-ton King George — Kable & Underwood’s sealing and coastal fleet, launched where commuters now cut through to Pitt Street. The Royal Australian Historical Society marked the yard as Green Plaque 68 in the mid-1980s Bicentennial series; look for it rather than expecting timber slips.
The red-brick building at the bend is a later joke the street tells on itself — a 1930s–40s residential-style block dropped into a commercial canyon. It is not part of Underwood’s yard.
Bulletin Place
Bulletin Place is a short Quay-end lane between the Pitt Street / Bridge Street warren and Macquarie Place — one of the few Sydney thoroughfares named after a publication. J. F. Archibald’s weekly The Bulletin was published from here after its foundation in 1880, with stores and offices toward the Pitt Street end, until the paper moved to larger George Street premises in 1897. Writers including Henry Lawson and A. B. “Banjo” Paterson knew this pocket of the city; the mid-nineteenth-century warehouse façades that survive are the bit of “olde Sydney” the steel-and-glass Quay has not quite erased.
Jazz fans will think of The Basement — long a Circular Quay institution — but the club’s famous addresses were in the Reiby Place / Macquarie Place block next door, not a doorway halfway down Bulletin Place itself. It is the same Quay warehouse precinct, but the lane was not the club.
