Reservoir Street, Surry Hills, is exactly what it sounds like — named for the Crown Street Reservoir (Sydney Water WS 0034) on the block bounded by Crown, Reservoir, Riley and Campbell. Earlier it was Gipps Street; the present name followed the waterworks that still sit on the high ground of the block. City Council bought the reservoir site from Riley Estate land (then under Burdekin ownership) in the mid-1850s; the covered brick service reservoir, designed under City Engineer Edward Bell (with Will Wadsworth) and built 1857–59, became a key node of the Botany Swamps scheme and remains among Australia’s oldest continuously operating covered service reservoirs.
Around it, mid-to-late nineteenth-century terraces, workshops and small businesses filled in after Riley Estate partition and sale — the Reservoir Street and Fortitude conservation setting City of Sydney heritage schedules recognise. Gates and frontages on Reservoir Street still give the closest public view of the operational Sydney Water site (no public entry to the chambers). Photographs here record Reservoir Street’s terraces and the reservoir-block edge — not interiors of the works.
