MARRICKVILLE UNEARTHED

marrickville unearthed

The houses and people that turned a 
neighbourhood into a community
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Dedication

This website is dedicated to the houses and people of Marrickville. It is a celebration of our past and the road travelled to our present. It is filled with stories about the houses and buildings that shape our neighbourhoods and the people who lived in them. From time to time the legacy of one of our pioneers will be put under threat by an imperfect development process. A page on this site is dedicated to these special buildings in the hope that by understanding their history we might honour them instead of demolishing them. And if the axe does fall, they will be remembered here, in memoriam.

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The Marrickville story

The beginning

During the 1800's the town of Sydney grew into a city with all the accompanying growing pains of crowds, illness, infant mortality and debauchery. It developed a class system based on the English model. The upper class emerged from the early military rule and was supplemented by a wave of affluent British migrants who saw New South Wales as the promised land. The lower class were born out of Sydney's convicts and burgeoning migration program designed to entice labour to the colony as replacement for the defunct convict workforce.


Early Marrickville
In 1855 Thomas Chalder subdivided his estate and sold it as "Marrickville". Far from the city, it was an idyllic rural neighbourhood where dairy farms and market gardens co-existed cheek by jowl. Marrickville became a place of escape for the wealthy who could return to the City in their own transport whenever they needed to. Much of the land was subdivided into villa sized allotments and was bought in bundles by those who wanted large spaces not available in the City and who yearned to be surrounded by genteel neighbours.
Early Marrickville was sparsely populated as much of the land was held by speculators who never intended to move to the area, but could see its long term potential. In this climate, Marrickville's grand houses began to accumulate.

Marrickville grows
But time and science move forward. Trains and trams formed networks over the rapidly expanding suburbs and it became easier to move about Sydney without need of a retinue of carriages and horses. The allotments were cut down into halves and even thirds to accommodate the new workforce who now had the means to travel longer distances from home to work.
In 1889 a great flood wreaked disaster upon Marrickville. Unscrupulous developers had sold off swamp land close to the train station that was completely unsuitable for habitation. Marrickville Council scrambled to drain the swamp and turn it into an industrial zone. The name Marrickville began to stink as much as its water courses.

And the wealthy moved out.

Working class Marrickville​
By the 1940's Marrickville was proudly working class and the great houses were viewed with scorn. The destruction had already begun in order to  access the land the houses stood on. Dozens of families could be housed in place of one. Soldiers returning from world war II were faced with a housing shortage so the carnage could be justified. It continued for decades under the protection of a municipal development application process.

Marrickville today
Today's Marrickville is one that is very comfortable in its own skin. Grand houses and red brick flats sit side by side in a neighbourhood that embraces its identity as the bastard child of a duke and a pauper. It is the home of artists, professionals, the rich and the poor. It welcomes everyone.

It is a community.
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       Latest stories

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119 addison rd
demolition appLICATION

Marrickille's oldest house?
Ferndale sits glumly awaiting its fate. The fourth DA in 6 years has recently been submitted in an attempt to obliterate it from Marrickville's streetscape. In the residents battle against the various developers, some claims have been made that endow Ferndale with a provenance so tantalising and so extraordinary that their veracity needed to be put to the test. Along the way, the early provenance of the land that Ferndale stands on became more than extraordinary. The hands that held it were an A-Z of colonial royalty. For everyone who lives on the strip between Stanmore and Addison Roads, this one is for you.
read the story
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387 and 389 Illawarra rd
demolition appLICATION

A church, a home, a retail strip. This section of Illawarra Road represents a way of life that has almost disappeared from Marrickville. A time when people and businesses co-existed in harmony, New York style. But time marches on and now the Church and home are facing the bulldozer in order to make way for a shiny modern boarding house. But do new boarding houses meet a social need? Do they provide low-cost housing solutions? This is not so much a story but an investigation into who is really living behind the walls of the latest development fad. Drawing on current research from the University of NSW and statistics from the ABS, Dept of Planning and Dept of Fair Trading, the answer to those two questions might surprise you. And just a warning - this article is not for the faint hearted. It contains some very heavy data but at the end you will be able to make a better informed decision about whether destroying Marrickville's heritage buildings to make way for this new way of living will create a better Marrickville, or whether the creeping sanitisation of our suburb is destroying its social value irreversibly.
read the story
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inner west council
local housing strategy

Submissions closed in July but you can read the executive summary about how the Inner West plans to meet the increased demand for housing in our community.
local_housing_strategy_executive_summary_june_2019.pdf
File Size: 4224 kb
File Type: pdf
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