Surry Hills in the 1950s
In 1950 the terraces were coming down. Of the four areas within the city marked as slums to be cleared, three were in Surry Hills, and the photographers went through in the middle of it: a house with its front gone and its rooms open to the street, a truck backed up to the rubble, and blocks of bare ground where a street of houses had stood.
The scheme began as the council's own, for the blocks bounded by Devonshire, Marlborough, Lansdowne, Belvoir and Clisdell Streets. The state Housing Commission took it over late in 1947, and from the 1950s more than 240 homes and businesses along those narrow streets were demolished. What went was mostly the work of the forty years between the gold rushes and the depression of the 1890s, when Surry Hills was built up as a residential district of terraces; by the late 1940s its population had fallen to about 19,000, and it kept falling for another quarter of a century.
The clearance did not empty the streets before the camera arrived. A man leans on the cast-iron fence of a terrace still standing; three women wait at a gate with a dog while the house beside them is stripped; a woman sits on her step outside number 474. The man at work on a window frame has the city skyline through the opening where the glass had been.
What replaced it went up on the same ground: Housing Commission flats on Devonshire and Clisdell Streets in the early 1950s, and in 1961 Northcott Place, fifteen storeys promised as Sydney's biggest block of flats. The views west from Marlborough Street show that ground cleared and waiting, cars parked where the houses were. The chimneys are still standing on the party walls, after the rooms around them had gone.
