Garrison Church
Argyle Place, Millers Point
Henry Ginn; later work by Edmund Blacket. 1840 to 1846, completed 1878. Sandstone.
- Size
- About 17 m wide, walls about 14 m (heritage listing)
- Material
- Locally quarried sandstone, slate roof, stone tracery
- Status
- State Heritage Register, 1999. A working Anglican church
Its proper name is Holy Trinity, and the popular one is a puzzle. The link with the garrison comes from a centenary history of 1940 listing regiments that worshipped here, and from military insignia dedicated in 1952. The heritage listing itself says Holy Trinity was not in fact a place of worship for the garrison, which used St Philip’s.
It’s one of five surviving churches built with government money under the Church Act of 1836. Bishop Broughton laid the stone in June 1840. The depression of the 1840s slowed it down, services began in the unfinished building in 1844, and it wasn’t consecrated until 2000. Edmund Blacket added a pulpit and vestry and drew a tower and spire. The tower was never built, even after a split vote in its favour in 1887, and the large buttresses prepared for it have since been reduced.
A tradition says the human-head corbels on the east window, bought for £100 in 1860, are Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, but it’s only a tradition. A firmer claim to fame belongs to its masons. In 1855 they were among the first in Sydney to win the eight-hour day.
The stone
The mason was George Paton, who also built the Hero of Waterloo down the road. The listing calls the stone locally quarried. Some accounts say it came from the Argyle Cut next door, but the church was begun in 1840 and the Cut only by 1843, so that could apply only to its later stages. The honey and brown blocks of the walls are a good place to see the natural variation in the stone.
Sources
- Garrison Church, Sydney, Wikipedia
- Hero of Waterloo Hotel, Dictionary of Sydney (archived by State Library of NSW)
- Eight-hour day page, quoting historian Rowan Cahill, Union Songs