Monday, December 5, 2022

St Michael’s Anglican Church – Cnr Albion St & Flinders St – Surry Hills – New South Wales

If you come up Albion Street toward Flinders and the sandstone church on the corner looks like it’s been sitting there forever — that’s St Michael’s. Edmund Blacket designed the Gothic Revival chapel; the foundation stone went down on 29 September 1854. The congregation had already been meeting around Surry Hills for years — Albion Brewery, a school-house, even Darlinghurst Courthouse — before they got a proper church of their own. Don’t mix it up with St Michael’s at Vaucluse: same dedication, different suburb, different Blacket job.

The silhouette you see from the footpath is more than 1854. A belfry and the big Albion Street dormers arrived in 1888, six years after Blacket died. When Flinders Street was widened, John Burcham Clamp rebuilt the chancel, added vestries, and designed the adjoining Edwardian brick rectory — all 1917. The parish hall (1904) completes the group, which is heritage-listed as church, hall, rectory, grounds and fence.

In 2015 the congregation merged with the Vine Church plant; since 2017 the parish commonly uses the name Vine Church. That’s the living parish name — the architectural identity of the sandstone on the corner is still St Michael’s.

St Michael's Anglican Church - Cnr Albion St & Flinders St - Surry Hills - New South Wales

Monday, August 2, 2021

St Michael’s Church – Vaucluse – New South Wales

St Michael’s Church - Vaucluse

Up on Vaucluse Road, corner of Gilliver Avenue, St Michael’s sits like a sandstone punctuation mark in the eastern-suburbs skyline — tower and spire catching the light when you come over from Rose Bay. Edmund Blacket designed the original Gothic chapel; the foundation stone went down on 29 October 1875 and the little church opened on 17 February 1877. It was a small local building for a still-thin Vaucluse congregation, not the full silhouette you see from the street today.

As the eastern suburbs filled in, the fabric grew in stages. Cyril Blacket — Edmund’s son — worked on early-twentieth-century extensions that added transept, choir and sanctuary space. Then, in the late 1920s–1930s, Professor Leslie Wilkinson finished the west end, baptistery, tower and spire, and designed the parish hall (opened 1929). Wilkinson’s sensitive completion of Blacket’s core won the Sulman Medal for architecture. St Michaels became a full parish in 1913 and remains a landmark of the South Head Anglican parish.

So the familiar towered outline is largely Wilkinson’s finishing campaign on Blacket’s sandstone heart — associated with Blacket, yes, but completed as the skyline piece you recognise today.

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Monday, December 5, 2022