Paddy's Markets, Haymarket

Paddy's Markets is older than the buildings it's remembered in. Governor Bourke moved Sydney's hay and grain traders to a site by the cattle yards in Campbell Street in 1834, and let them trade until ten on a Saturday night — the start of the market that has run in Haymarket ever since.

The buildings in these photographs are the ones that made it a landmark: a series of municipal market halls — vegetable, fruit, poultry, fish — built between 1909 and 1912 to a design by City Building Surveyor Robert Brodrick and draftsman James Merriman. What survives of this decade is a market trading under iron roofs still new.

Stand 57 held potted plants and palms next to W. Crowe's cages of cockatoos, galahs and other parrots, each marked with a price; a few aisles over, second-hand coats and shirts piled a trestle table under a painted letter "A", and a horse-drawn cart delivered watermelons, rockmelons and pumpkins by the sackful. It's the specificity that carries the market — a stall number, a trader's name on a hand-lettered banner — more than any single building could.

Look for the cages stacked two deep behind W. Crowe's stand, and the crates of melons piled against the cart out front.