Stairs Landing

A landing on the staircase at the Terminus Hotel sits midway between the ground-floor bar and the upstairs accommodation rooms, the timber treads turning at a right angle around a central post. The handrail is polished timber, the spindles below it cast-iron in a simple pattern. The wall behind the landing is wallpapered in a faded floral print that climbs the full height of the stair. A small window in the wall above the landing admits the late-afternoon light from the John Street side of the building. The carpet on the landing is worn through to the underlay at the centre, where decades of foot traffic passed.

The visible building is the 1917 Tooth and Co. demolition and rebuild, undertaken to add accommodation upstairs as required by NSW licensing reform of the period. The staircase and its landing date from that rebuild. Pub patrons used the stair to reach the upstairs accommodation rooms; the publican's family and long-term guests used it daily across the working life of the pub. The pub closed in 1983 and the stair stopped carrying its usual foot traffic. The 2018 restoration kept the staircase in place as part of the heritage fit-out. The landing in this photograph is essentially as it was during the 33-year closure, made in 2016, two years before the building reopened.