Low sunlight along Circular Quay West of the long harbour front: rough stone base, dark red brick, stacks of timber loading doors, arched windows and parapeted gables. A palm tree and traffic cones in front.

ASN Co Building

1-5 Hickson Road, The Rocks

William Wardell, with Walter Liberty Vernon. 1884 to 1885; water tower 1892 to 1894. Brick.

Size
About 56 m long on OpenStreetMap, five storeys. No overall height found, so the drawing is estimated
Material
Polychrome brick over a stone lowest storey, sandstone dressings, timber posts and beams with cast iron capitals, slate roof
Status
State Heritage Register, 2002. Galleries, shops and offices

Robert Campbell built Sydney’s first private wharf on this shore in 1800. The Australasian Steam Navigation Company, formed in 1851, bought part of his land in 1876 and engaged William Wardell, the architect of St Mary’s Cathedral, to design its head office and warehouse. The Sydney Morning Herald described it on its opening day in July 1885: five storeys, “the first storey being of stone and the remaining ones of brick”. Heritage sources give both 1884 and 1885 as the date of building.

The site’s shape governed the design. A four-storey office bay stands at the north end under its spire, with a boardroom for shareholders, and four warehouse bays of different lengths step down the shore. A heritage assessment calls the style Pre-Federation Anglo-Dutch and says no later store of this construction was built in the area: it was among the last large warehouses in Sydney with a timber frame, and may be the earliest surviving building put up with steam cranes imported from England. The water tower came in 1892 to 1894 and fed one of the first sprinkler systems in Sydney, parts of which remain.

The company merged in 1887, and the Crown bought the building that year. It became the Government Ordnance Stores, passed to the Department of Defence in 1906, and from 1950 served as Commonwealth offices, with plywood and fibrous plaster partitions over the old structure. The Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority acquired it in 1989 and restored it to its 1880s appearance in the early 1990s at a cost of $5.7 million. One bay was gutted in 1990 for a cinema attraction, The Story of Sydney, which closed the next year.

Sources

  1. ASN Co building, Wikipedia
  2. ASN Co Building CMP, 1-5 Hickson Road, The Rocks, GML Heritage