William Wallbank and Sons

William Wallbank and Sons sits on Parramatta Road in a long single-storey commercial building, the name running across the upper parapet in painted capitals on a cream ground. The lettering is well-formed, the kind of hand-painted signwriting that ran on Sydney commercial buildings through to the 1980s before vinyl and printed boards took over. The shopfront below carries narrow display windows along a recessed entry, the door set back from the road. The front of the building is in shadow at the time of the photograph; the upper signage catches the last of the day's sun. The traffic behind the camera has thinned for the evening.

Parramatta Road runs west from Sydney's CBD as the city's oldest arterial road, and businesses like William Wallbank and Sons mark the corridor's long history as Sydney's middle-market commercial spine. Family-name businesses on the road were the rule rather than the exception through most of the twentieth century, with the family name and "and Sons" or "and Co" denoting the long-running family-trade operations that built the corridor's commercial fabric. Many of those names are now gone. Brett photographed William Wallbank and Sons at 20:25 on 5 September 2016, in the corridor's last commercial hour before the road quietened down for the night.