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General Post Office building 2001

By
Gary Deirmendjian
Contributed By
City of Sydney Archives
[021\021022]

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Built environment
Subjects
Postal services Public building Victorian architecture
Buildings
General Post Office
People
Barnet, James
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Martin Place

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Deirmendjian, Gary

City of Sydney Archives

Built environment

Built over tracks, campsites, rock art and middens used for thousands of years before the dispossession of the Aboriginal people, Sydney's early haphazard development was given form by public buildings. As public transport developed, suburbs spread, and throughout the twentieth century, town planners struggled with developers to direct the form and extent of the city. After World War II, city buildings got taller, outer suburbs sprang up ever further away, and issues of heritage and architecture were contested. In the twenty-first century, concerns about environment, urban density, public transport and renewed infrastructure are driving change.

Public building

Victorian architecture

Postal services

General Post Office

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Renaissance Palazzo style building in Pyrmont sandstone on the corner of George Street and Martin Place. The building was constructed on the site of the earlier George Street General Post Office in two stages from 1866 to 1892 as the headquarters of the Government's growing postal services. In the mid 1990s part of the building was sold and converted for use as a hotel, with the remainder of the building being sold to the hotel's operators Far East/Sino Land in 2017.

Barnet, James

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Colonial architect who designed many of Sydney's public buildings.

Martin Place

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Wide street running through Sydney's centre, from the General Post Office at the George Street end, and completed when Sydney City Council resumed property to extend the street all the way to Macquarie Street in the 1930s. Lined with elegant buildings of grand design and lavish materials it has been entirely pedestrian since 1979.