Stairwell Looking Up

The stairwell of the Braidwood Hotel runs through the full height of the building, its timber joists, beams and stair stringers arranged around a central void that opens toward a bright window at the top. The photograph looks straight up through each level, the structural framing repeating as it rises. Rendered walls line the shaft; cracks run through the surface and sections of lath are visible where plaster has fallen away. The woodwork is bare and weathered, stripped back to what the building is made of. The hotel stands at 180 Wallace Street in Braidwood, NSW, a Georgian-style building constructed in 1859 during the Gold Rush expansion of the district. Gold had been discovered at Araluen and Majors Creek in 1851, and Braidwood became the primary supply town for the surrounding goldfields. The population of the town and its surrounding fields reached an estimated 10,000 in the decades that followed. The Commercial Hotel, as it was then known, was built into that prosperity. The NSW State Heritage Register listing records the construction date as 1859 and notes the building within a Wallace Street streetscape described as "a fine collection of 19th century buildings." The hotel is a rendered brick structure with stone foundations and high ceilings consistent with the Georgian-period character the SHR listing identifies across the town. The upper levels contain accommodation rooms, and the stairwell in this photograph connects those levels. The building is individually listed on the Heritage Management System State Heritage Inventory as "Braidwood Hotel, including verandah and cast iron lacework," and falls within the "Braidwood and its Setting" conservation area listed on the NSW State Heritage Register on 3 April 2006, the first entire town to receive that designation. The hotel has operated continuously as a licensed pub since 1859. It has never closed. The stairwell recorded here in 2016 was part of an ongoing restoration programme that had been running through successive owners for years. What the photograph holds is the building mid-process: the structure intact, the surfaces honest about their age, the light still finding its way down from above.