REFLECT
Parramatta Road – Being Versus Going BY DR ELIZABETH FARRELLY
What’s the difference between a street and a road? National Trust (NSW) Board member, author and architecture critic, Dr Elizabeth Farrelly, believes that it is about being versus going: where a road is a conduit, a street is a place to be – to mill, to socialise, to explore.
We seldom think of streets as places to be. Yet Sydney, like London before it, has a tradition of magical high-streets. (And no, this is not some colonial straitjacket we need to shrug off. It’s a glorious past from which to grow a still-more glorious future). Consider Oxford Street from Woollahra to Darlinghurst or King Street from Darlington to St Peters: defined by two-storeyed shophouses quite as charming as London’s Camden High Street or Singapore’s Neil Road – and admired and beloved for their qualities of being-there, of dwelling.
terraces and boarded-up shops…” that was “congested even on a Sunday morning.” Little has changed, despite small flowerings of restaurants and bridal shops – conspicuous in their snowy whiteness – along the way. Will e-vehicles change this, reducing noise and pollution? Or autonomous cars, reducing the carriageway by enabling closer packing of cars? Or the government’s proposed $100m in council grants to support planting and street furniture? Would a heritage paint scheme, like the City of Sydney’s for King Street Newtown, make a difference? Perhaps. Just such smallscale improvements helped turn Cleveland Street Redfern into a pedestrian experience that, if not pleasant, is at least bearable. But the key to civilising Parramatta Road is to change our collective perception of it from a traffic sewer into a series of places. Even now, behind the soot and above traffic-level, are kilometres of late 19th and early 20th century shop houses. The key to changing this perception is to prioritise foot-people over car-people.
The Parramatta Road, as our most venerable highway, is every bit as well-endowed in physical terms. Yet it’s seen in a very different light. Despised as filthy, noisy and congested, the Parramatta Road is avoided by both shoppers and drivers – be-ers and goers. Would renaming it Parramatta Street help? A road is named for the place to which it leads. It’s about going, not being. In 1973, Ruth Park described Parramatta Road as a line of “endless used-car yards… dejected 10
National Trust (NSW)
