Off Melbourne Street: Two Worlds in Lower North Adelaide
with Keith Conlon

There are tiny two-roomed cottages and grand mansions in the same street... a tale of two worlds of early Adelaide is on show just a short walk off the trendy cappuccino cafe scene on Melbourne Street in Lower North Adelaide.

At the main intersection with Jernignham Street, there's plenty to survey over a coffee. It is the start of Adelaide's first ever suburban subdivision, Chichester Gardens, celebrating its 160th anniversary for a start - more on that later.

Schmidt the baker built an attractive freestone and brick shop with residence above on the south east corner late last century. The elaborate concave iron-roofed verandah is a late twentieth century addition, mimicking the hotel opposite. A bank for the last couple of decades, it's now another latte lovers' lair.

The Old Lion Hotel over the road was built as part of a brewery. Much of its bluestone facade is intact, and the towering stone chimney is the only one left of 30 or so which once loomed over the city.

The pub, now a designer drinking hole, had plenty of custom in its first incarnation. A century ago, there were footy shops along Melbourne Street. In the 1960's, Derek Jolly (all fast cars and futuristic ideas) began the street's revival. It's coffee cafe driven these days, and as we discovered on Postcards this week, there's a time capsule waiting for you to walk into it just beyond.

First, let's head to nearly Finniss Street, to get right back to the roots of South Australia. Boyles Travis Finniss may well have helped survey this road - he was, after, assistant to Adelaide's founder and surveyor, Col. William Light. Finniss went on to become the colony's first Premier.

The sign on the handsome two storey dressed stone British Hotel says it was first licensed in 1838, but more recent research has shown it's been here since Christmas of 1837. That is just twelve months after the Proclamation of South Australia.

Just a few doors up from the pub (rebuilt in the 1880's boom period for the city) is a fine example of genuine Georgian architecture. Publican William Johnston had them built in 1851. Underneath the paint layers of the two-storey attached pair of residences are simple brick details and mice proportions..an antidote to the Georgian overkill of today.

There's another link with Adelaide's first days a short walk westward. The town-acres here were owned by George Stephenson, private secretary to Governor Hindmarsh. On them, he built "Buffalo Cottage", named, of course, for the official settlement ship that brought Hindmarsh and Stephenson to these plains. Built in 1851, it is still to be seen behind a high fence.

Returning to Melbourne Street, and heading into North Adelaide a short block in on its northern side, you're at once in historic real estate territory. Narrow Sussex Street runs through the first ever subdivision in the state. Quaker and pioneer businessman and farmer John Barton Hack took up this section and ran a vegetable garden before he carved it into more than 200 small blocks - Chichester Gardens, (one of the tiny cottages on its Stanley Street edge now has a plaque calling itself that).

In its 160th anniversary year, you'll find a number of second generation workmen's cottages from the 1850's. The first were even more humble, made of pug. At 66-68 Sussex Street, bricklayer Gottfried Rieger's four little attached cottages are still intact complete with small casement windows. They've been combined into two residences.

There was a strong German presence here, and countryman Andrew Borchard, the basket maker, built attached single-fronters further down at 120 Sussex Street. The external wooden door to the loft is typical Silesian style. Combined to form one pretty home-stay cottage, it's just a few steps in length, right on the street.

Trendy North Adelaide is hardly the place you would expect to find a mission church, but that's exactly what creeper covered St Cyprian's on Melbourne Street was all about. The well-off Anglicans up the hill supported it to spiritually sustain the poor down the hill.

By the 1880's, there had been a big influx of Irish immigrants to the area - so much so that Lower North Adelaide was called ŒIrishtown'. An Anglican priest wrote that he and his Catholic counterpart had to break up sectarian boyhood yikes over the back fence of the little church.

Col. Light's plan for North Adelaide has the lower section climbing up onto a plateau to meet the upper section in one corner. It takes wide, leafy Stanley Street from humble cottages on the flat to grand mansions as it climbs to the top of the hill.

With its terracotta tiles atop two rambling storeys, Nurney House has a distinctly Italian look behind its high walls to Stanley Street. It was built in 1846 to take advantage of commanding views across the Torrens Valley. Kapunda copper king Captain Charles Bagot began a Bagot dynasty that's still resident. His great grandson, Walter Bagot, a well-known architect, added an authentic Italian garden and a spectacular entrance way at the rear on Kingston Terrace.

Running through to the parklands as well is St Andrew's, next door. With a distinctive French mansard roofline designed by its first owner, architect James McGeorge, its Gray tow-storey bulk is softened by extensive gardens sloping down to its Stanley Street wall.

It was the home of the Adelaide draper who became a national department store mogul, David Murray. His store in Rundle Street operate until the 1950's, giving South Australians a non obscure piece of rhyming slains. "No David Murray's" means "no worries".

Stanley Street provides great contrasts. Down the hill are tiny cottages built on small allotments that were part of historic Chichester Gardens. 51-53 Stanley Street was originally two two-roomed cottages. Built hard on the footpath, it dates from 1850. A couple of doors on at 57-61, the German connection was again evident when Dietrick Kretschmer built two more cottages the next year.

Almost at the eastern end of the avenue is the historic Kentish Hotel. The two-storey arched masonry verandahs give it a distinctive character. It was rebuilt in the 1880's. Before that, it had played its part in the state's sporting history. Publican John Cocker was a handy bowler in Kent before he took up the licence here in 1848, and so he founded the Kent and Sussex Cricket Club at the pub, with its cricket ground out the front where exclusive Mann Terrace meets the parklands.

He is landed by some as the father of South Australian cricket, as he was asked to prepare the first pitch on the hallowed turf of one of the prettiest test cricket grounds in the world; Adelaide Oval. The South Australian Cricket Association had gained its continuing lease of the ground in 1872.

The Kentish is a nice spot to end our Postcards time capsule tour of historic Lower North Adelaide. Lemonade? Or something stronger?