Sydney CBD in the 1950s

This is Sydney in its last low decade. The 150-foot height limit that had shaped the city since 1912 was lifted in 1957, and what you see here depends on it — the even sandstone parapets, the rooftop views that actually reach the Harbour Bridge, the way St Mary's still rises above its neighbours. Within fifteen years of these frames the same streets would be unrecognisable from above.

On 29 January 1951, fifty years on from Federation, the Cavalcade of Jubilee came through the city, and close to 400,000 people stood five and six deep to watch it. Sam Hood photographed it from above: the Boy Scouts' float under the slogan "Happy Healthy Citizens", the Education Department's "Education Lights and Guides", a butchers' association float with women in costume posed around it, and the crowd pressing into the roadway right up to the wheels.

At street level otherwise it is a city of arcades. The Strand, opened in 1892 and the only one of the city's Victorian arcades to survive in its original form, appears here from its upper galleries; so does the Royal Arcade, Thomas Rowe's 1881 run from George Street through to Pitt, with a photographic supplies kiosk trading inside it. The Royal would be demolished in 1969 and the Hilton built over it, which makes an ordinary shopping photograph the only way most people will ever see the inside of it.

The same year as the Jubilee, Pitt Street was photographed looking north to the Bridge, King Street looking west to George, and Martin Place from Castlereagh Street — still a street with traffic on it, two decades before it became a plaza.