Sugar Cafe, early

Mill Hill - Victorian gothic

Whereas Ruthven Street was graced with two-storey terraces decorated with 'Paddington lace', St James Road is populated with single-storey 'Victorian Gothic' terraces with 'gingerbread' barge boards. Neither thoroughfare is particularly long (about 250m) and they back onto each other, being separated only by a service lane.


Both style of housing is semi-detached, originally with toilet and laundry in structures in the back-yard. They appear to be vastly different in value, but frequently houses built in the second half of the 19th century were built by small speculators who built the first house, lived in it, whilst building the other 4 or 5 adjacent houses. So it may have been constrained by the wealth of the builder, not the buyer.

Mill Hill - Shades of Miss Haversham

This must be what Charles Dickens had in mind in 'Great Expectations' as Satis House, where lived the haughty but sad, Miss Haversham, left at the alter all those years earlier. This terrace is one of many similar in the area, and was probably built in the 1880s when many similar terraces were also built in nearby Paddington.

This is the corner of Ruthven & Gowrie Streets in Mill Hill. Surely, no one resides behind this vine! However, the vine looks to be alive, so I shall return in the spring.

Yesterday, I was telling you the story of Henry Hough's 10 acre Hope Farm, and its windmill. Thanks to a very recent research paper by the Local Studies Librarian at Waverley Library, here is the last standing windmill of its type in Sydney, demolished about 1885. The sketch is by Samuel Elyard and is dated 1868.


Here are the opening scenes to the 1946 Lean 'Great Expectations' film, with the wonderful Finlay Currie, who scared the living daylights out of me the first time I saw the film in the early '60s. Lots of scary wind in the opening scene but, alas, no windmill.

Mill Hill - St Barnabas de-frocked

We are endeavouring to have a conversation about renewable energy in Australia at the moment, and wind-farms are much in the news. With this in the back of my mind, come with me on a meander through the 'Mill Hill' area of Bondi where Henry Hough established his Hope Farm, on which he built a mill in 1845, it eventually being demolished in 1880. Many of the buildings in this area have been demolished several times over, but there is still sufficient to get the general flavour.

This is the former St Barnabas Church of England, which has been converted into three townhouses. Built in 1902 in ecclesiastical Gothic style, the church was an impressive brick chapel with bell cradle. It caused no end of angst to the congregation of St Matthias in Paddington when this parish was hived off from its eastern boundary to service the burgeoning Bondi area. It was deconsecrated in 1986. Church conversions are all the rage in country NSW, but as I wandered this small city enclave, I discovered two such conversions.