Green Square is an area rich in history and human stories. Each wave of new inhabitants have made their own mark on the area, creating a colourful and distinctive local character.
The story begins with the traditional Indigenous owners of the land, who inhabited the coastal areas of Sydney at least 8,000 years ago. Living in the local area were the Gadigal clan – one of 29 clans of the Eora nation – who would fish in the nearby creeks and swamps, hunt wildlife and collect food and raw materials.
With the arrival of European settlers after 1788, the lands of the Gadigal people were gradually annexed. Daniel Cooper – a powerful colonial businessman – grew to be an important figure in the local area. His family owned extensive areas of land covering suburbs we know as Alexandria, Waterloo and Zetland.
At this time, Green Square was still a place of wetlands that included Shea’s Creek and Waterloo Swamp. Market gardening thrived on the fertile flats of Shea’s Creek, providing vegetables for the growing town of Sydney. The plentiful water supply was one of the reasons Green Square was chosen as a home for industry. Daniel Cooper, in partnership with other prominent local entrepreneurs, decided to build the Waterloo Flour Mill on the future Town Centre site. The mill was one of the largest employers of its time.
The Green Square locality grew to become a major industrial centre. A series of other businesses joined the flour mill at Green Square as industrialisation began changing the face of Western society. Soap and candle factories, breweries, tanneries, glassworks and wool-washing were all important local industries.
The area saw the construction of the State’s largest brickworks, enabling much of the new city of Sydney to be built.
During the World War Two era, the area had become the largest industrial precinct in the Southern Hemisphere. Alexandria was tagged the ‘Birmingham of the South’, and was home to some 22,000 workers and 550 factories.
With the rise of industry, Green Square took on a rich and colourful working class character. A total of 22 pubs sprang up nearby, filled at the end of each working day with drinkers from the local factories.
Early in the 20th century local workers could also attend the racecourse at Victoria Park, which opened its gates in 1909. Later, that site was also taken over for industrial uses, becoming the nation’s largest car manufacturing plant which produced famous models like the MG and Morris.
As well as a place to work, the area was also a place to call home.
Green Square has long been an area with a diverse population who lived in the locality throughout the years of industrialization. In the early 1800s, the area welcomed Irish and English settlers, some of them working in the local flour mill. Towards the end of the 19th century, Alexandria became home to Sydney’s largest Chinese population, many of them market gardeners.
Housing the local population were a range of home types including Victorian terraces, some of which can still be seen today. Then in 1912, towards the south of the current Town Centre, came the Rosebery Estate – a pioneering planned ‘garden suburb’ where detached homes were built in a leafy open setting.
It was a sign of things to come. Much later, at the end of the 20th century, planned residential development began changing the landscape once again. New apartments were built on some of the former factory sites, including Landcom’s Victoria Park which houses a vibrant young community in an award-winning urban environment.
During the 1990s, the former South Sydney Council marked out the 278-hectare Green Square Urban Renewal Area for redevelopment. The hub of the area will be the new Green Square Town Centre, mixing lifestyle shops and open-air cafes with dynamic office accommodation and designer apartments.
Replacing the noise and smokestacks of the past is a visionary sustainable development of clean air, open space and parkland. While embracing the future, the Town Centre will acknowledge its past in a range of different ways, from restored heritage features to public art that tells the story of the local area.
Further details of Green Square’s history can be found here.