Bridge Street in the city is one of Sydney’s oldest streets dating back to the formative days of the colony. Where Bridge Street is today, 500 metres south of the Circular Quay railway station and ferry terminus, was the site of the first bridge in the Port Jackson settlement. It was a simple log construction, erected in October 1788 just months after the colony was founded, and allowing passage over the Tank Stream, the source of Sydney’s main fresh water supply in the early days.
After several timber bridges came and went, they eventually put up a more substantial (supposedly ‘permanent’) stone bridge in its place (near the corner of Bridge and Pitt Streets), which also had to be replaced owing to it being considerably less substantial than first thought and not permanent at all◵. Bridge Street at that time was called Governors Row as it housed the colony’s first seat of government and the governor’s residence (on the corner of Phillip Street). A commemorative stone on the site (now housing the Museum of Sydney) marks the historic location.
An early painting of the city (a facsimile of which can be viewed on a wall in The Rocks) shows Governors Row (Bridge Street) extending all the way from the water at Darling Harbour up the hill to the first Government House.
Governors Row became Bridge Street when Lachlan Macquarie took over the colony’s governorship in 1810 and initiated a renaming project of Sydney’s streets as part of his reform program. In 1846 Bridge Street was extended up to Macquarie Street and Government House was relocated to its present location as a domain within the Botanic Gardens.
Lower Bridge Street: Residential to Commercial
Early on, the lower part of Bridge Street contained many fine houses, but these were gradually replaced by the head offices of shipping and trading companies because of the advantage of being close to the harbour.
Upper Bridge St: Chock-full of Heritage sites
From the mid 19th to the early 20th century construction in the upper part of Bridge Street formed the architectural character that distinguishes it today. A series of government buildings—grand in scale and elegance and richly elaborate—were built using sandstone quarried from nearby Pyrmont.
Treasury and Audit Office building (1849-51)
Corner of Macquarie and Bridge Sts. Architect: Mortimer Lewis. During the NSW gold rush shipments of gold were stored here. Today the building with a high vertical extension added is the huge, 580-room Intercontinental Hotel with a section housing the Sydney annex of Southern Cross University.
Chief Secretary‘s Office⍟ (1869)
Victorian Italianate building directly opposite the Treasury building. Architect: James Barnet. Equally impressive sandstone block. One of the most aesthetically endearing features are the five carved figures of women on the corner of the facade. The megasized building block wraps around into the western corner Phillip Street.
Department of Education (1914) and Lands Department (1877-90) buildings
These two havens of state bureaucrats, further down Bridge St, round out the classical sandstone quartet. The Lands Dept block, built to the design of James Barnet, is a Classical Revival style building. Like many of the public buildings of the era it’s built from Pyrmont sandstone. The Education building (Architect: George McRae) is of a later architectural trend reflecting the popular Beaux-Arts fashion.
Commercial buildings dominate the lower end of Bridge St. The Royal Exchange Building (1967) at № 21 Bridge St stands on the original site of the Royal Exchange building (1857) – the first home of the Sydney Stock Exchange. Numerically next to the REB (at № 17-19) is the Singapore Airlines House (1925), an elegant example of the Commercial Palazzo style of architecture.
Perhaps the standout architectural piece of the lower commercial sector is the old Burns Philip and Co head office building (1898-1901) close to George Street, with its elaborate sandstone and brick Neo-Romanesque facade. Architect: Arthur Anderson. Burns Philip were big players in the Australian shipping and trading business. Originally, a convict lumber yard sat on this site.
The pick of the rest of the commercial buildings for compact elegance are probably the brace of adjoining buildings, № 4 Cliveden and № 6, (across the road from BP&Co). The street’s first commercial high-rise building, constructed 1913 in the Federation Free Classical style. Next door to the left of Cliveden is Anchor House (1960), for many years the HQs of the NSW Liberal Party. The site in the early Colonial period contained a female orphan’s asylum which later relocated to a site in Parramatta (now part of a Western Sydney University campus).
Postscript: Macquarie Place
Halfway up Bridge Street, making a refreshing break of greenery from all the high monolithic buildings dominating the streetscape, is Macquarie Place. A diminutive triangular park which in colonial times was part of the governor’s garden. The park which now backs on to a trendy bar frequented by big-end-of-town ‘suits’ contains some gear salvaged from the First Fleet (anchor and cannon of HMS Sirius). A feature of interest of the park for passionate monarchists are two plane trees planted by the Royal duo Liz and Phil back in 1954 (now very tall and expansive).
Macquarie Place as it was in the early colonial period, unrecognisable today (Source: http://dictionaryofsydney.org/)
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◵ the bridge was finally demolished in the 1840s when the Tank Stream got channelled into an underground tunnel where it remains, what’s left of it that is
⍟ previously the Colonial Secretary’s Office
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★ The genesis of this piece resides in my curiosity about the street name’s origin. The first association anyone has with Sydney, especially the city itself (ie, the CBD), is the Harbour Bridge. The city is the Harbour Bridge! It’s part of its lifeblood. So I guess I’d always just took it for granted that the street was named in honour of THE Bridge and thought no more about it. Then one day I was casually flicking through the pages of a 1922 Sydney street directory —as you do—when I had the (mini) eureka moment, Bridge Street was listed, it was there on the map, a good ten years before the Harbour Bridge made its debut! That set me off searching for what actually lay behind the naming of the street.
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Reference sites consulted:
‘The History of Sydney: Early Colonial History 1790-1809’, (Visit Sydney),
http://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/history-6-early-col.html
‘Bridge Street Heritage Walk’, Pocket Oz Travel and Information Guide – Sydney (Visit Sydney),
http://www.visitsydneyaustralia.com.au/bridge-street.html
‘Bridge Street’, Dictionary of Sydney, http://dictionaryofsydney.org
‘Bridge Street, Sydney’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/