Brickworks

This corner, where King Street, Newtown turns into the Princes Highway, features the remains of the chimneys and brick kilns from the old brickworks site. These chimneys have been kept as heritage items and are a dominating feature of this area. They are now part of Sydney Park.

The Sydney Park site played a significant role in the development of Sydney during the 19th century. Brick making was begun on the site in the 1840s by Henry Goodsell and became a major industry in 1871 with the introduction of machine manufactured bricks. Bricks manufactured here built Sydney’s suburbs over a period of more than 100 years. The first batch of machine-made bricks was used in the construction of the Farmers’ Building on the corner of Market Street, Sydney. In 1893 Josiah Gentle opened the Bedford Brickworks, named after his home town in England. In 1933 the firm was taken over by Austral Bricks which operated here until 1970. The Sydney Park site has also been used for a range of other industrial development including gas storage in two tanks, manufacturing and warehousing.

The brickworks dug out the clay leaving huge pits which were filled up with municipal waste from 1948 to 1976. Since the closure of St Peters tip a final layer of soil and building rubble has been placed over the site to create a new regional park. This includes a series of visually prominent hills which provide panoramic views of the city skyline and Sydney Airport and are used for recreational activities such as kite flying. Stormwater detention ponds have been transformed into wetland habitat to partly recreate the pre-European environment. At the same time the area’s industrial heritage has been preserved with the kilns and brickworks chimneys at the corner of Sydney Park Road and the Princes Highway.