Christ Church - St Laurence - Anglican Church - 814 George Street - Haymarket - Railway Square - NSW

Christ Church St Laurence stands at 812–814 George Street, Haymarket, right beside Railway Square and Central Station — the sandstone tower and spire you clock when you come in from the south. The parish dates from 1838. Bishop William Grant Broughton laid the foundation stone on New Year’s Day 1840 and consecrated the church on 10 September 1845: the first Anglican church in the city consecrated by a bishop, and still among the oldest Anglican church buildings in Sydney in continuous use.

Henry Robertson began the design; money troubles stalled the build before Edmund Blacket — later Sydney’s leading Gothic Revival architect and a long-serving churchwarden here — finished the interior (ceiling, tracery, fittings) and, in the 1850s, the tower and spire. The church became a centre of Anglo-Catholic worship in a diocese that leaned the other way — ritual, music and social action rather than a plain “preaching box.” A fire in 1905 damaged the interior; John Burcham Clamp led the restoration.

The church, hall and rectory group is on the NSW State Heritage Register. From George Street the spire still marks the railway-age city edge for anyone walking up from Central — a continuous place of worship from convict-era neighbours to the present.