Sydney's industrial heritage is concentrated in a band of suburbs that ring the inner harbour: Rozelle, Eveleigh, Pyrmont, Ultimo. These were the working precincts of a working city. Power stations, rail yards, paint shops, wharves. The buildings were functional before they were interesting, and most of them stayed functional until they weren't, then sat empty for years before anyone decided what to do with them.
White Bay Power Station is the largest and most intact of them. It operated from 1917 to 1983, supplying power to Sydney's tram and suburban rail network for 66 years. The turbine halls and control room remain. The boilerhouse lost three of its four original Babcock and Wilcox boilers during a 1990s decontamination pass. Boiler No. 1 stands in the northern section with the voids of the three removed ones still visible around it. Overhead travelling cranes sit on their rails in the turbine halls. It is the kind of space that reveals itself slowly. The scale only becomes apparent when you are inside it and your own body provides the reference point.
The Eveleigh Paint Shop is a different kind of building. It was purpose-built for painting and finishing NSW Government Railways carriages, with the main brick wing completed in 1887. The building has a sawtooth south-light roof, glazed panels pitched north, which was the standard approach in nineteenth-century industrial construction for getting consistent, workable light onto the floor without direct sun on the work. Single rows of cast iron columns separate the rail roads down the length of the nave. Natural light falls across the floor at an angle that changes with the season. It is a building that was designed to admit light because the work required it, and that quality persists long after the work stopped.
Both buildings are heritage listed. White Bay Power Station has been reopened as a cultural venue. The Eveleigh Paint Shop is in the middle of a precinct renewal process. Both have been absorbing that planning and transition for a long time. In the meantime, they remain as they are: large, substantially intact, and carrying the particular atmosphere of places that have absorbed decades of human activity and now sit with it.
See the White Bay Power Station series and the Eveleigh Paint Shop series.
