Downstairs Office

The downstairs office at 37 Nancarrow Avenue, Meadowbank sits in the kind of disorder that comes not from a single event but from a long, slow withdrawal. Papers cover the floor in layers. A chair has been pushed or knocked from its position and left there. Whatever filing system once kept this room organised has collapsed into debris. The room is small, functional, and entirely undecorated, the workspace of people whose job was administration, not manufacturing. The building around it was purpose-built around 1947 for Automatic Totalisators Limited, a company incorporated on 21 April 1917 by Sir George Julius, the mechanical engineer and consulting partner of the firm Julius, Poole & Gibson, who designed the structure. Julius had spent years developing a mechanical system capable of automatically calculating and displaying racecourse betting pools in real time. By the time the Meadowbank factory was completed, his machines were already installed at racecourses across multiple countries. Julius himself died on 28 June 1946, months before the factory was finished. He never walked through its Art Deco foyer. The factory at Nancarrow Avenue became the company's third and final manufacturing site, succeeding earlier premises in Newtown and on Chalmers Street near Central Station. From Meadowbank, ATL shipped totalisator equipment to racecourses in 29 countries. The company also manufactured automatic turnstiles, hospital communication systems, vehicle registration plates, and commercial signs. By 1966, ATL had developed the world's first computer totalisator system. As electromechanical systems gave way to fully electronic ones through the 1970s and 1980s, manufacturing at Meadowbank declined. ATL's operations were acquired by the Smorgan group in 1980, then by AWA around 1988. The factory building was subsequently repurposed as a multi-tenant facility housing a gym, a church, office space, and a dance school before falling vacant. The ATL Building was demolished around 2016. The site was redeveloped as part of the Shepherds Bay Urban Renewal Project, with residential apartments completed at 6 Nancarrow Avenue in 2018. This photograph, made in 2015, records the office as it was in the building's final year.