Beer Garden

The beer garden at the back of the Terminus Hotel sits behind the kitchen and stores, a paved courtyard between the rear of the building and the boundary wall. By the time of this photograph the garden has been left untended for decades. Ivy covers the walls on all three sides and reaches over the boundary onto the roof of the adjoining building. Grass and weeds push up between the brick pavers. A timber pergola once carried a vine across the centre of the garden; the pergola is still standing but the vine has gone wild and joined the ivy on the walls. A single timber bench against one wall is buried in foliage. The garden reads as a green room rather than an outdoor service area.

Beer gardens were the warm-weather drinking spaces of inner-Sydney pubs through the twentieth century, and the Terminus's was part of the original 1917 Tooth and Co. layout of the rebuilt building. The garden ran heavily on summer afternoons across the working life of the pub. The pub closed in 1983 and the garden was left to itself for the 33 years that followed. The ivy that became the building's defining exterior feature started growing in this garden in the 1960s or 1970s and spread out from there. The 2018 restoration cleared the garden for service.