LEWISHAM: A SHORT HISTORY OF A SMALL SUBURB

Told Through Its Streets

Lewisham is small enough that you could miss it if you blinked at the wrong time on Parramatta Road. But like most Inner West suburbs, the closer you look, the more it gives away. The story of its housing is written into the streets – in the way they bend around the railway, in the mix of workers’ cottages, terraces and flats, in the names that survived the subdivisions.

The railway came first. In the mid-1800s, the Sydney–Parramatta line carved its way through what would become Lewisham. The viaduct over Long Cove Creek was significant enough that the governor-general took a special trip just to inspect it before the line officially opened. The station itself arrived later, in 1885, and changed everything. What had been rural land grants and big estates began to fracture into residential blocks.

Stand on the platform now and you can see the layers. Close to the tracks, around Railway Terrace and along the streets that run down toward New Canterbury Road, you get the denser, mixed fabric: older walk-up flats from the post-war years, some more recent infill, sections of semi-detached housing. Move a few streets away and you hit the conservation pockets – federation villas, freestanding and semi-detached homes with stained glass and verandahs, hinting at the suburb’s earlier aspirations.

New Canterbury Road slices through as an old arterial, lined with a familiar Inner West mix: converted shops, small apartment blocks, the occasional stand-alone house stubbornly holding its ground. Parramatta Road forms the hard northern edge; the Hawthorne Canal and parks around it soften the western boundary. The map reads like a compromise between transport and liveability, history and necessity.

Lewisham’s name itself comes from an early estate owned by a judge and businessman who borrowed the title from a borough in London. That little piece of imported identity set the tone for what followed: a suburb that was always meant to be residential rather than industrial, even if it ended up sitting next to some of the city’s noisier roads.

The fun part, if you like this kind of thing, is walking it with that history in your head. You can go from a two-bed flat in a mid-century block to a federation house with original tessellated tiles to a row of compact terraces in the space of a few minutes. Each turn tells you what mattered at the time it was built: access to the station, access to work, status, affordability.

For today’s buyers, Lewisham’s housing stock is a kind of time machine. Some are here for the older homes – the streets that still feel like a small village wrapped around a station. Others are here because the units make financial sense in a market where neighbouring suburbs have already surged. But whether they realise it or not, they’re all participants in a story that started with a viaduct, a rail line, and a decision to turn farms into streets.

In a city that forgets its own history quickly, Lewisham wears its past in plain sight. You just have to walk slowly enough to read it.

— From the desk of
Ramon Raneal