Stand at Circular Quay and you’re looking at Warrane — the Gadigal name for this small southern embayment of Port Jackson. Governor Arthur Phillip brought the First Fleet into Botany Bay as ordered, decided the anchorage and fresh water weren’t good enough, and chose this cove instead: deep water close inshore and a reliable freshwater creek running into its head. That creek became the Tank Stream — sandstone tanks cut beside it in drought years gave it the name — and it was the reason the camp sat here at all.

On 26 January 1788 the fleet shifted from Botany Bay and the Union Flag went up beside the stream. The cove was named for Thomas Townshend, Lord Sydney, the British Home Secretary. Early settlement occupied both foreshores: government and convict camps on the east and west, Tank Stream in the middle. By the later nineteenth century the stream was covered as a drain, the foreshore was pushed out by reclamation, and the head of the cove became Circular Quay. Today the Opera House sits on Bennelong Point at the eastern tip; The Rocks and Barangaroo frame the western shore.

Sydney Cove - 1788

 

SYDNEY  COVE 1788

Oxford Square – Cnr Riley Street & Oxford Street – Darlinghurst – New South Wales

 

Oxford Square  - Corner Riley & Oxford Street - Darlinghurst  - New South Wales 

Oxford Square is the named junction of Oxford, Riley and Burton Streets in Darlinghurst — on the old South Head Road / Oxford Street high street that climbed from colonial track to one of Sydney’s principal shopping strips by the late nineteenth century. The southwest Oxford–Riley corner was long dominated by Buckingham’s department store (drapery origins with William Buckingham; store presence on this corner from the 1890s; major emporium into the twentieth century). After the business was sold in 1967, the partly emptied building went up in the spectacular Anzac Day fire of 25 April 1968; the cleared site later became a shopping complex still known as Oxford Square / Oxford Village.

Opposite and around the junction, the Oxford Square Group of Victorian and Edwardian buildings — former Family Hotel, former London Bank / ANZ chambers at 52–54 Oxford Street, G. A. Zink & Sons at 56 Oxford Street, SILF Company building — remains a registered heritage streetscape. Those Neo-Classical corner compositions still frame the views into Riley, Burton and Oxford. Nearby Burdekin Hotel (Liverpool & Oxford) marks the western entry to the strip but is a separate landmark.

Photographs here survey surviving façades and the retail setting of the former Buckingham’s corner. Don’t confuse Oxford Square with Taylor Square further east.