Happy 203

Blue string lights run along the awning of a small whitewashed brick shopfront at 203 Parramatta Road, its red Happy Open signage and phone number pressed against the glass. Next door, a Raine and Horne Burwood For Lease board marks a darker premises with the roller shutters drawn. Headlight trails from passing traffic streak across the road surface in the foreground. The photograph was made at about nine in the evening on 5 September 2016.

Two shopfronts side by side, one lit and trading and one on the market, is the ordinary condition of Parramatta Road rather than a contrast anybody arranged. By 2015 more than 100 stores along the corridor had been documented as vacant or derelict, and a good part of that emptiness is held rather than accidental, with owners waiting on the rezoning uplift proposed by the NSW Government's Parramatta Road Urban Transformation Strategy. That plan was released in November 2016, two months after this photograph, and set out 30 years, eight precincts, 27,000 new homes and 56,000 additional residents. In the meantime the businesses that stay open do it on late trade and passing headlights, with the lights on well after the offices have emptied.