Gaming Floor

The room is gutted and filled with rubbish. A black bin bag slumps in the foreground and a partly visible Tigers box sits on the concrete floor. White circular graffiti is sprayed across the right wall, framed rectangles hang dark and bare on the left, and an open cabinet is visible beyond the doorway to the right. What remains is scattered debris and spray paint. The Balmain Leagues Club opened in 1957 on the corner of Victoria Road and Darling Street, Rozelle, purpose-built as the social and community home of the Balmain Tigers rugby league football club. The multi-level building housed a ballroom, main bar, reception and function rooms, and a gaming floor. For more than five decades, the registered club model sustained the Tigers through gaming, dining, and bar revenue. The club closed on 28 March 2010. The NSW Government had issued a notice to vacate for a proposed Sydney Metro transport project. That project later changed alignment and was never built on the site. The building sat empty on one of Sydney's busiest arterial roads while developers, councils, and government agencies worked through a sequence of rejected applications, ownership changes, a compulsory acquisition, a reversal of that acquisition, a voluntary administration, and two separate fires. By 2015, when these photographs were made, the interior had deteriorated substantially. Copper wiring had been stripped. Windows were smashed. Graffiti covered the walls. In the ballroom, floorboards had buckled from water damage. The gaming floor had fared no better than the rest: stripped back to concrete, with the rubbish left where it fell. The building was demolished in 2024 to 25. The site at 138 to 152 Victoria Road, Rozelle, is now under construction as Rozelle Village, a mixed-use development approved in May 2025 that will include a new Balmain Leagues Club facility. These photographs record what stood on that corner before it was taken down.