Building It

Town Hall from the corner of George & Druitt Streets. (image: City of Sydney Archives, CRS 80/176) Click here to see a larger version of this photo Size: 51 KB

Sydney Town Hall has stood for over a century as the major public and civic building in the city of Sydney. It was built in two stages between 1869 and 1889 to an extravagant scale and style during a boom period in Sydney’s history. The Town Hall dominated Sydney’s commercial heart when it was built, and retains some of that dominance today, despite being surrounded by high rise buildings.

In architectural style, the Sydney Town Hall is French Second Empire, deriving inspiration for its motifs, roofscapes and elaborate interiors from the Louvre and Hotel de Ville in Paris and chateaux around Paris and in the Loire Valley. The exterior of the building is built primarily from Sydney ‘yellowblock’ sandstone and elaborately carved by stonemasons. The building has a slate roof and was originally surrounded by landscaping and a palisade fence.

Inside, the building exists on four separate levels, has more than a hundred rooms, and its construction in two separate stages has resulted in a building with linked sections of moderately different character. There were many architects, contractors and trades people involved in construction. Not one of them can solely claim to be ‘the’ architect or ‘the’ builder of the Town Hall. Several key players died before the Town Hall was completed. As the Sydney Mail reported on the day of the Town Hall’s gala opening in 1889, ‘its erection has been beset with many vicissitudes’. (30 November, 1889, p. 1208).

This section – Building It – introduces some of the ups and downs of the construction of the Town Hall. It mentions some of the "major" figures involved in the building project. Unfortunately, the City of Sydney Archives does not have any records relating to individual workers who built the Town Hall. They only have the names and contracts for the main contractors, not their employees. So the many men who put in the hard work actually building it remain anonymous.