History of Hyde Park

Hyde Park is Australia’s oldest park, officially established in 1810. The park is bordered by Elizabeth, Liverpool and College streets and Prince Albert Road, and is divided by Park Street.

Hyde Park began as an unfenced common for use by the people, reserved by Governor Arthur Phillip in 1792. On the common, animals grazed, settlers cut scrub and trees for firewood, and brickmakers dug clay from the southern end. Carts and cattle trundled across the common. Locals and garrison troops used it for recreation. For Aboriginal inhabitants the southern end was a ceremonial contest ground.

Governor Lachlan Macquarie named it Hyde Park on 6 October 1810, after London’s great royal park. He formally dedicated it as a space for recreation for the people of Sydney and as a practical symbol of public virtue and government benevolence.

Civil Architect Francis Greenway envisaged the park as a ‘grand quadrangle’ with elegant landscaping, surrounded by public buildings in neoclassical style as part of his grand plan for the design of Sydney.

Hyde Park was the site of the colony’s first official racecourse and cricket ground from the 1820s. In the 1830s Governor Ralph Darling proposed to sell off the park for houses, but his successor Governor Richard Bourke decided against this plan and reaffirmed its status as a park.

1832 to 1926

College Street was built in 1832 and separated a portion of the park used for a convict garden, which later became Cook + Phillip Park.

In 1837 a new water supply known as Busby’s Bore piped water to Hyde Park. Ten years earlier, the NSW governor had accepted a proposal from surveyor John Busby to build a tunnel from Lachlan Swamps (now part of Centennial Park) to Hyde Park. This tunnel was built by convicts and took 10 years to complete. It enabled the delivery of fresh water to the town centre. The main public outlet was a raised pipe in Hyde Park, where Sydneysiders queued to purchase water at threepence per bucket.

The park remained without grass or trees in the first half of the 19th century. In 1844 memoirist Louisa Meredith described it as ‘utterly destitute of trees’ and ‘merely a large piece of brown land fenced in’. This began to change when the Hyde Park Improvement Committee was established in 1854. The cricket ground was moved to The Domain in the mid-1850s, and the park began to be formalised with paths and plantings from the early 1860s.

Hyde Park transformed into a more passive, decorative open space with the beginnings of formal landscaping and the addition of civic monuments and infrastructure. The Park’s 19th century layout featured straight paths, with a central avenue of Moreton Bay fig trees continuing the line of Macquarie Street. Other landscaping reflected the less formal ‘gardenesque’ tradition, with lawns interspersed with clumps of trees and shrubs, water features and a bandstand.

During the 1850s the ‘tree of knowledge’ in Hyde Park became a venue for Sunday speeches on political and civic topics, and later election meetings. These speeches and discussions added to the noise of football, fighting, drinking, gambling and fireworks displays in the park. Hyde Park was also used for processions and official gatherings such as a ball to welcome Queen Victoria’s son in 1868, for which a pavilion was built.

The park’s first civic monument was a sandstone obelisk on Elizabeth Street in 1857, designed and built by Sydney Municipal Council. It was the centrepiece of Sydney’s new sewerage system and was unveiled by Mayor George Thornton. Although cleverly disguised as a full-size replica of Cleopatra’s Needle, the Egyptian antiquity now displayed in London, the monument is a sewer vent intended to release noxious gases. It was dubbed ‘Thornton’s scent bottle’.

A statue of Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, was erected in 1866, 5 years after his death. This statue was moved to the Royal Botanic Garden in 1922 and was then relocated in front of Hyde Park Barracks in 1987. Another statue, erected in 1879, depicts Captain James Cook.

Between 1876 and 1878 the park was enclosed by a low stone wall with an iron palisade fence. Its corner entrances had gates and sandstone piers topped with gas lamps. Hyde Park, which measured 40 acres, was formally dedicated for public recreation in 1878.

Botanist Charles Moore (1820–1905) was the director of the Royal Botanic Garden in 1848–1896. He was a member of the Hyde Park Improvement Committee and appointed a trustee of Hyde Park and nearby Cook + Phillip Park from 1878 to 1896. He made recommendations about plantings and the layout of Hyde Park, which were followed from the 1850s until the turn of the century.

Sydney Municipal Council took control of Hyde Park in 1904. A program of upgrades began, but this work was swept away with the construction of the City Circle railway line in the 1920s and 1930s.

The train line, built between 1916 to the early 1930s, saw most of the park excavated. The fig trees were cut down and the park was fenced off and dug up using the ‘cut and cover’ method. Two new railway stations – St James and Museum – were built on the western boundary of the park by 1926, with access from Elizabeth Street. Streets surrounding the park were widened.

1926 to present day

In 1926 Sydney Municipal Council announced a competition to reshape Hyde Park. Engineer and former City Surveyor, Norman Weekes, prepared the winning landscape design. His design reflected European traditions and the ‘city beautiful’ ideal with grand plazas and avenues, and vistas framed by impressive monuments.

Weekes’s design philosophy echoed Governor Macquarie’s original vision of the park as an expression of civic benevolence. Yet Weekes also wanted the park’s open spaces and plantings to be Australian in character. He selected endemic trees and shrubs, including flowering eucalypt and acacia, and used Aboriginal names for features in the park. At the northern end of Hyde Park, where the Archibald Fountain is now, Weekes planned an octagonal-shaped formal ornamental garden and fountain which he named ‘Birubi Circle’. Birubi is a place name at Port Stephens and is a Worimi/Awabakal language word that translates as ’place of the Southern Cross’.

Weekes’s design also allowed for traffic to enter the park, with a bridge across Park Street uniting the 2 sections, which had been separated since 1834.

Council modified the plans extensively for economy and practicality. Just one year after Weekes’s winning design was accepted, many of his ideas, including Aboriginal place names, were discarded. While his full vision for Hyde Park was never realised, some elements have been incorporated into the park’s design over time.

The present-day landscaping of Hyde Park, with its radial, fig tree-lined pathways, was carried out in the mid to late 1930s after the completion of the underground city railway and the Anzac Memorial in 1934. The remodelling of the park in this period was a major Depression-era relief project. Landscaping included ‘reconstruction’ work in the southern section to build new paths and a rockery adjacent to College Street, as well as removing old trees and planting new trees.

Two key monuments were erected during the reconstruction in the 1930s. The Archibald Fountain was installed at the northern end of the park in 1932. The fountain commemorated the association between Australia and France during World War 1. The Anzac Memorial opened in 1934 at the Liverpool Street end of the park. Together, these monuments created focal points at opposite ends of the park’s central avenue.

In the 1950s, as the replanted trees matured, more changes were made to the park. The bandstand near the corner of Park and College streets was demolished and replaced by the Sandringham Garden.

A giant chess board near St James Station was installed in 1972. Nagoya Gardens were built at the northern end of the park in 1983, to recognise Sydney’s sister city agreement with Nagoya, Japan in 1980.

Yininmadyemi, Thou didst let fall was installed in 2015 to acknowledge and honour Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who served in the nation’s military.

Sculptures and memorials

Anzac Memorial and Pool of Reflection

In 1929 a competition was held to design a permanent memorial to Australia’s World War 1 soldiers in Hyde Park. Architect Bruce Dellit won the competition in 1930, in collaboration with sculptor George Rayner Hoff. Construction on the Anzac Memorial was not started until 1932 because of ground works to build the underground City Circle railway. The memorial was completed and officially opened in November 1934.

The memorial consists of an Art Deco ziggurat in red granite, breaking with the classical tradition of existing war memorials. It features distinctive Australian imagery and symbolism, including the rising sun, and evokes the physical strength and energy attributed to the Anzacs. The aim was not to glorify war, but to emphasise its tragedy and horror. Dellit and Hoff also wanted to acknowledge the sacrifices of women in war. The Pool of Reflection, in front of the memorial, invites passers-by to stop and remember.

Hyde Park Family Centre

Sydney’s first women’s public lavatory was built in 1910 near the corner of Park and Elizabeth streets. The toilet was considered a failure by the council due to low use. It was replaced in 1955 by the Hyde Park Family Centre (also referred to as the Women’s Amenities Centre) to provide facilities including childcare for visiting women and children. The centre was demolished and the area grassed over in 2000.