Skip to main content

The Dictionary of Sydney
Multimedia
General Post Office building 2001

General Post Office building 2001

By

Gary Deirmendjian

Contributed By

City of Sydney Archives

[021\021022]

Search

Browse

Browse
- Artefacts
- Buildings
- Events
- Natural Features
- Organisations
- People
- Places
- Structures
- Entries
- Multimedia
- Subjects
- Roles
- Contributors

Connections

Appears in

Built environment

Subjects

Postal services Public building Victorian architecture

Buildings

General Post Office

People

Barnet, James

Places

Martin Place

Footer

Home
About
Copyright
Contact

Footer Secondary

Contribute
Donate

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

full record »

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

full record »

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

Martin Place

full record »

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.