Amenities Ground Level

The ground level amenities block was the second building on the Nancarrow Avenue site, a structure separate from the main ATL factory, warehouse, and offices. Its purpose was practical: dressing rooms, showers, and a canteen for the people who worked the factory floor. At a precision manufacturing operation producing totalisator systems for export to racecourses across 29 countries, this was the infrastructure behind the work. 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 on Nancarrow Avenue were repurposed as a multi-tenant facility. After that tenancy ended, decay set in. By 2015, the amenities block showed it clearly: tiled walls streaked with grime, broken windows letting in flat, diffuse light, fixtures abandoned under a settled layer of dust. The factory at 37 Nancarrow Avenue 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 at 6 Nancarrow Avenue was completed in 2018. This photograph was taken in 2015, before the clearance.