Famous Landmarks in Sydney
Concrete shells, riveted steel and Victorian sandstone sit within sight of one harbour.
Sydney's most photographed landmarks cluster around the harbour that gives the city its shape. The Opera House occupies Bennelong Point on the foreshore, its white-tiled concrete shells rising over the water in an expressionist departure from anything built in the country before it. A few hundred metres away, a riveted steel arch finished four decades earlier, in 1932, carries road and rail across the same harbour to the North Shore, its plain industrial form a contrast to the Opera House's curves. Inland, in the central business district's grid, the Queen Victoria Building keeps a different register: sandstone, copper domes and round-arched windows, built in the 1890s as a produce market and later restored as a shopping arcade.
Sydney Opera House
1973 · Peter Hall
A cluster of white-tiled, sail-like concrete shells rising in ascending rows over the water, their curved profiles set against a harbour skyline.
Danish architect Jørn Utzon won an international design competition in 1957 and directed construction after the New South Wales government, led by premier Joseph Cahill, authorised the project in 1958. Utzon resigned before completion amid cost and scheduling disputes, and an Australian team led by Peter Hall finished the building, which Queen Elizabeth II formally opened on 20 October 1973. It occupies Bennelong Point between Sydney Cove and Farm Cove and now houses multiple venues used by resident companies including Opera Australia, staging more than 1,800 performances a year for over 1.4 million attendees.
- Jørn Utzon won the design competition in 1957 but resigned before the building was finished, following disputes over cost and schedule.
- It stages more than 1,800 performances a year for over 1.4 million attendees.
Photo: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden (CC BY 2.0)
Sydney Harbour Bridge
1932
A grey riveted steel arch spanning the water in a single shallow curve, with a stone pylon at each end and a lattice of girders visible along its underside.
John Bradfield of the New South Wales Department of Public Works directed the project, and the British firm Dorman Long designed and built the bridge, which opened in 1932 to link the central business district with the North Shore. It carries rail, road, bicycle and pedestrian traffic and is nicknamed "the Coathanger" for its arch. Its overall scheme echoed New York's Hell Gate Bridge, though Dorman Long's winning tender drew on its own Tyne Bridge. Measuring 134 metres from top to water level, it was the world's widest long-span bridge until Vancouver's Port Mann Bridge overtook it in 2012.
- Nicknamed "the Coathanger" for its arch-based design.
- Its general scheme was a rough copy of New York's Hell Gate Bridge, though the winning tender drew on Dorman Long's own Tyne Bridge.
- It was the world's widest long-span bridge until Vancouver's Port Mann Bridge was completed in 2012.
Photo: Bengt Nyman from Vaxholm, Sweden (CC BY 2.0)
Queen Victoria Building
1893–1898 · George McRae
A long sandstone building with a row of copper domes along its roofline, the central dome the largest, and round-arched windows running the length of the block.
George McRae designed the building in the Romanesque Revival style, and it was constructed between 1893 and 1898 on a block bounded by George, Market, York and Druitt streets in the Sydney central business district. It measures 30 metres wide by 190 metres long, and its domes were built by Ritchie Brothers, a firm that also made trains, trams and farm equipment. Conceived as a marketplace, it was later put to other uses and fell into decay before being restored to retail use in the late twentieth century, and is now co-owned by the City of Sydney and Link REIT.
- Its domes were built by Ritchie Brothers, a company that also made trains, trams and farm equipment.
- It runs 190 metres long, the length of an entire city block.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)
General Post Office
1866–1891 · James Barnet
A pale sandstone facade stretching 114 metres along a public square, its ground floor a continuous arcade of round-arched openings beneath a central tower.
James Barnet, the Colonial Architect, designed the building, built in two stages from 1866 using sandstone quarried at Pyrmont. Its main facade, 114 metres long, has been called the finest example of Victorian Italian Renaissance style in New South Wales. The building served as the headquarters of Australia Post until 1996, when it was privatised and refurbished; a scaled-back counter service continues on its George Street side as the GPO Post Shop. Despite extensive internal remodelling, the facade survives largely unchanged and is listed on both the Commonwealth Heritage List and the State Heritage Register.
- The building's central axis lines up with the ANZAC Cenotaph, a war memorial in the square it faces.
- The public square in front of it, now known as Martin Place, is said to have taken shape largely because of the building, whose construction led to the clearing of the narrow lane it once fronted.
Photo: Simon_sees from Australia (CC BY 2.0)
St Mary's Cathedral
1866–2000 · William Wardell
A sandstone Gothic Revival church with two spired towers flanking its main facade and a taller central tower further back, pointed arches and buttresses running the length of its nave.
The present cathedral is the third church on this site: the first, begun in 1821, burned down in 1865, and a temporary wooden replacement also burned, in 1869. Archbishop Polding laid the foundation stone for the current building, designed by William Wardell in the Gothic Revival style, in 1868; his successors saw it through further stages, with the nave dedicated in 1928 under architects Hennessy, Hennessy and Co. Wardell's planned spires were not added until 2000. Pope Pius XI raised the church to the status of minor basilica in 1932.
- The parish priest who requested the site reported having a vision in 1821 of twin spires rising above the city, a vision fulfilled only after three buildings and roughly 180 years.
- Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, who died in office in 1939, lay in state inside for several days before burial in Tasmania.
Photo: Dietmar Rabich (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Hyde Park Barracks
1817–1819 · Francis Greenway
A plain brick building and compound in the Neoclassical style, standing on Macquarie Street among the city's other early colonial civic buildings.
Governor Lachlan Macquarie commissioned Francis Greenway, himself a convict transported for forging signatures, to design barracks housing 600 men; construction began in 1817 and the building opened in 1819, after which Macquarie granted Greenway a full pardon. As convict transportation wound down, the buildings held a female immigrants' depot from 1848 and an asylum for destitute women from 1862 to 1886, before passing to the courts. Now a museum, the site is one of eleven Australian Convict Sites inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List and reopened in 2020 after an $18 million restoration.
- Each of the largest rooms slept 70 men, with every hammock allotted a space of just 2.1 by 0.6 metres.
- The building has also been known as the Mint Building, the Rum Hospital and Queen's Square Courts, reflecting its many later uses.
Photo: Sardaka (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Fort Denison
1841–1857 · George Barney
A round, thick-walled sandstone tower dominates a tiny island in open water, its cannon embrasures now mostly empty and its upper courses scarred by shell damage from a wartime attack; a small lighthouse lantern tops the roofline where a gun once stood.
This small island in the harbour, once called Pinchgut, held convicts sentenced to isolation from 1788 and displayed an executed murderer's gibbeted body in the 1790s. Concern over foreign attack led engineer George Barney to recommend fortifying it; construction began in 1841, stalled, then resumed in 1855 during Crimean War fears of Russian attack, finishing in 1857. Its Martello tower, built from 8,000 tonnes of sandstone with walls up to 6.7 metres thick, held three muzzle-loading cannon too cramped to fire effectively. A 1913 lighthouse replaced a rooftop gun, and 1942 shellfire from an Allied warship still marks the tower.
- The executed convict Francis Morgan's body was gibbeted in chains on the island for four years after his 1796 hanging.
- In 1900, three sailors, one of them Charles Lightoller, later the most senior officer to survive the Titanic's sinking, rowed out at night and fired a blank cannon shot to fake a raid, fooling nobody but shattering some windows.
- The tower's cannon embrasures were cut too small to aim properly, and by the time a gun was reloaded any ship it targeted would already have sailed past.
Photo: James Porteous, CSIRO (CC BY 3.0)
History
Aboriginal Australians, including the Darug, Dharawal and Eora clans, had lived around the harbour for at least 30,000 years before James Cook charted the coast in 1770. In 1788 the First Fleet founded Sydney as a British penal colony, the first European settlement on the continent, and the colonial-era street grid still shapes the central business district. The Queen Victoria Building rose there in the 1890s as a produce market, part of the same Victorian building boom that gave Sydney its sandstone civic architecture. Engineering ambition followed: the Harbour Bridge opened in 1932 to link the CBD with the North Shore. Decades later, after post-war migration reshaped the city, an international design competition produced the Opera House, opened in 1973 as a deliberately modern counterpoint on the harbour foreshore.