Bar Entrance

The bar entrance at the Terminus Hotel sits in the chamfered corner of the building where Harris and John Streets meet, the doorway recessed into the brick face under a stone hood. The door is a timber double-leaf with frosted-glass panels in the upper half, the lower panels solid timber painted in the institutional dark green of the pub's exterior trim. A brass kickplate runs along the bottom of each leaf, scratched and dulled. A small etched-glass panel above the door carries the word TERMINUS in a Federation-era serif face. The doorstep is bluestone, worn at the centre where decades of patrons crossed it. The light catches the brass of the door handles and the etched glass above.

The corner-entry doorway was the public face of the Terminus through every shift of its working life, and it sits at the original tram terminus of the Harris Street electric line, which is where the pub took its name when it was renamed around 1900. The visible doorway is part of the 1917 Tooth and Co. demolition and rebuild. The McElwaine family closed the door in 1983, and it stayed shut through the 33 years that followed. The 2018 restoration brought the door back into use. The photograph captures the threshold at one specific point in the long gap between closure and reopening.