Amenities Ground Level

Lime green walls meet tiled surfaces at a ground level staircase inside the ATL Building. A metal handrail rises past a single white light switch, still fixed to the wall beside a partially demolished doorway with exposed brickwork. Dark brown and white chequered risers run along the stair base, and dust and debris coat the concrete floor. This was a precision manufacturing operation producing totalisator systems for export to racecourses across 29 countries. Automatic Totalisators Limited incorporated on 21 April 1917. The company moved through two earlier factory sites in Sydney before relocating to the purpose-built Meadowbank premises in 1947, on land along the northern bank of the Parramatta River. The site was designed by Julius, Poole & Gibson, the consulting engineering firm founded by Sir George Julius, the inventor of the mechanical totalisator. Julius died on 28 June 1946, months before the Meadowbank factory was completed. He did not see the building his firm had designed. In the decades following ATL's manufacturing decline through the 1970s and 1980s, the factory buildings were repurposed as a multi-tenant facility. That tenancy ran until shortly before this photograph was made. The factory had been listed as a locally significant heritage item under Ryde Local Environmental Plan No 105 in 2003. That protection did not hold. The Planning Assessment Commission approved the Shepherds Bay Urban Renewal Concept Plan on 6 March 2013, with the heritage listing overridden by state-significant development approval. The ATL Building was demolished around 2016. The Shepherds Bay residential development was completed in 2018. This photograph was taken in 2015, before the clearance.