Dressing Room

The amenities building at the ATL Building on Nancarrow Avenue, Meadowbank, was a separate structure from the main factory. Where the factory housed the toolroom, the warehouse, and the offices, this building held the facilities for the workforce: dressing rooms, communal showers, and a canteen. A stool sits before a mirror in one of those dressing rooms, both now coated in the accumulated dust of years of vacancy. Paint has lifted from the walls in long curls, pulling away from the plaster underneath. The mirror reflects little more than the slow deterioration of the room around it. Automatic Totalisators Limited moved its manufacturing operations to the purpose-built Nancarrow Avenue site in 1947, having previously operated from premises at Chalmers Street, near Central Station. The land had been purchased from a family called Faraday; the road itself, Nancarrow Avenue, was created as part of the factory development and did not exist beforehand. The main building housed the factory floor, warehouse, and offices. The amenities building alongside it was built to the same era, serving the men and women who manufactured precision totalisator systems for export to racecourses across 29 countries. ATL's operations were acquired by the Smorgan group in 1980, and subsequently by AWA around 1988. Through the 1990s and 2000s, the factory buildings were repurposed as a multi-tenant facility: a gym, a church, office space, and a dance school all occupied the site at various points. The dressing rooms that had once served a precision manufacturing workforce gradually emptied and were left behind. The ATL Building was demolished around 2016 as part of the Shepherds Bay Urban Renewal Project. Despite being listed as a locally significant heritage item under Ryde LEP No 105 in 2003, the building was approved in principle for demolition under the Shepherds Bay Concept Plan, approved by the Planning Assessment Commission on 6 March 2013. The site was subsequently redeveloped for residential apartments. This photograph, made in 2015, records the dressing room as it stood in its final years.