Chao-Xing Li

Centennial Park is the only Sydney suburb where the front yard is a national heritage landscape. Its residential footprint is a slim wedge of streets pressed against the western and southern edges of the 189-hectare Centennial Parklands, and almost everything about the place, the price, the quiet, the near-total absence of anything resembling a shop, […]

There is no “corner shop” in Barangaroo, no primary school run, no cul-de-sac full of kids on bikes. What there is: a reclaimed container wharf turned into the most expensive apartment stock in the country, a sandstone headland rebuilt blade by blade to look like it was never touched, and a resident population you could […]

There are perhaps 170 occupied households in Dawes Point, and most mornings the loudest thing that happens to any of them is a freight train’s worth of traffic thundering across the Harbour Bridge deck directly overhead. That is the honest trade-off here, not a marketing line: you get one of the most photographed pieces of […]

St Peters spent most of the twentieth century as a hole in the ground. Brick kilns, clay pits and rail sidings did the work here while more photogenic suburbs got the postcards, and the scars of that history are still visible if you know where to look: warehouse shells now selling flat whites, a former […]

Millers Point is the rare Sydney suburb where the real estate section and the front page have been fighting over the same streets for a decade. On one side: sandstone terraces on Lower Fort Street selling at auction for figures that would embarrass a Vaucluse agent. On the other: an elderly public housing community, some […]

John Sulman planned Rosebery in 1911 as one of Australia’s earliest garden suburb experiments: workers’ cottages set around leafy streets, built specifically to sit next to the industry that employed the people living in them. More than a century on, the industry has largely gone, the cottages share the streetscape with glass-and-render apartment blocks spilling […]

Chippendale is what happens when a brewery closes and nobody tears the whole thing down. For most of the twentieth century this was 0.5 square kilometres of workers’ terraces backing onto the Kent Brewery (later Carlton United Brewery), a gritty, industrial pocket wedged between Central Station and the University of Sydney. The brewery closed in […]

Eveleigh is not really a suburb in the way that word usually gets used. It is a 0.53 square kilometre pocket wedged between Redfern and Erskineville that happens to contain one of the most significant pieces of industrial heritage in the Southern Hemisphere, a major contemporary arts venue, and a corporate campus housing thousands of […]