Marios Meat Market

MEAT is painted three times across the weathered blue facade of a former butcher shop at 209 Parramatta Road, Annandale, the lettering still bold enough to read at night. The shopfront below is derelict, its windows broken and its signage gone soft with age. Above it the apartment windows are lit. The photograph was made at about half past nine on the evening of 5 September 2016.

Shop below and dwelling above is the oldest commercial arrangement on Parramatta Road and the one that has outlasted most of the trades it was built for. A butcher needed a street frontage, a cold room, and a residence close enough to open early; the corridor was full of them. What this frame records is the two halves of that arrangement coming apart, with the residential floor still occupied and the retail floor finished. The signwriting is the last part of the business to go. It was painted to be read from a moving vehicle, in the largest word available and repeated three times, and it is still doing that job for a shop that stopped trading well before the photograph was made.