Location
St Peters is a suburb in the Inner West of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is 7 kilometres south of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of Inner West Council. (wikipedia)
History
St Peters was named by its association with St Peters Anglican Church, which was consecrated in 1838. St Peters is the third oldest Anglican church in Sydney and has been claimed to be the first church built in Australia using non-convict labour. The church is on the Princes Highway. It was designed by Thomas Bird and built in 1838-39. In 1875, alterations were carried out under the supervision of Edmund Blacket. The church is now listed on the Register of the National Estate. The graveyard is the burial place of a few notable people, including solicitor and merchant Frederick Wright Unwin, who had Unwin Road and Unwin’s Bridge named after him. It is also the burial place of people who committed suicide, patients of the Bayview Mental Asylum at Tempe, and victims of unsolved murders. Graveyard history tours are conducted monthly.
The first large land grant in the area was made in 1799 to Provost-Marshal Thomas Smyth. His 470 acres stretched from the Cooks River to the present Campbell Street. After Smyth’s death in 1804, the land was acquired by Robert Campbell (1769–1846), a wealthy merchant who built some of the early warehouses along the Sydney Cove waterfront.
Alexander Brodie Spark (1792–1856) was a wealthy merchant who named the suburbs of Tempe after his mansion Tempe House that he built at what is now Wolli Creek and the suburb of St Peters that developed around the church. Barwon Park House was a large residence erected by Spark in 1815 on land leased from Robert Campbell. It was demolished in 1953. Campbell sold his property in 1830 but reserved land for the church. St Peters was described in the 1840s as one of the most fashionable and aristocratic suburbs of Sydney.
St Peters was a separate municipality from 1871 to 1948, when it amalgamated with the Municipality of Marrickville but now falls under the governance of Inner West Council. The St Peters town hall in Unwins Bridge Road was built in 1927 just across the suburb boundary in Sydenham and now houses the St Peters branch of Inner West Library and a small community centre. The railway station opened on 15 October 1884 and the post office opened in October 1851.
Brickworks
In the 1870s, St Peters was an important brickmaking centre with a large brickworks on the site now known as Sydney Park, on the corner of Mitchell Road (now Sydney Park Road) and the Princes Highway, close to St Peters railway station. The brickworks closed after World War II and for most of the 1960s and 1970s the site was used as a rubbish tip, with the vast clay pits eventually filled by domestic and commercial refuse. After the tip closed in the 1980s, Sydney Park was created on the site. The area was covered, landscaped and revegetated so that several large artificial hills were created with sweeping views south to Botany Bay and north to the city. Four towering chimneys that carried exhaust from the brick kilns remain standing and have been incorporated into the Sydney Park site along with some of the kilns and various pieces of large brickworks machinery. The remains of the brickworks were heritage-listed.
The brickworks are well known in paleontology for the discovery of a full, intact skeleton of a Paracyclotosaurus davidi in 1910. The Paracyclotosaurus davidi was a prehistoric amphibian and the only known species to have lived in Australia. (wikipedia)
Places of Interest
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