Hero of Waterloo Hotel
81-83 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point
No architect recorded; built by the stonemason George Paton. 1843 to 1844. Sandstone.
- Size
- Three storeys. No dimensions found, so the drawing is estimated
- Material
- Ashlar sandstone walls, timber joinery, stone cellars
- Status
- State Heritage Register, 1999. Privately owned and reported to be trading
George Paton was a stonemason who had worked on the Garrison Church nearby. He built a small stone kitchen and bedroom on this corner, now part of the cellar, and then the three-storey hotel on top, and took out the first licence on 30 June 1845. It’s one of the oldest surviving pubs in Sydney, though several hotels compete for that title.
It survived by luck as much as by construction. After the bubonic plague outbreak of 1900, the Sydney Harbour Trust resumed much of the area in 1901 and demolished many hotels, and many other licences went after the Liquor Act of 1912. The Hero stayed. Its bar was two rooms until a partition came out in 1928, and in 1988 the Department of Housing sold it into private hands.
Pub stories need care. A popular legend has a secret tunnel running from the cellar to the harbour, for press-ganging drunken patrons onto ships. The heritage text records tunnels and cells in the stone cellars, but no source consulted confirms one reaching the water. A claim that convicts built it as a barracks in 1804 is, according to the Dictionary of Sydney, simply wrong.
The stone
Inside the bar the sandstone is left bare. Some accounts say the stone came from the Argyle Cut. The Dictionary of Sydney says only that Paton held a quarry lease on Observatory Hill. Gauge marks on the blocks exist, but they don’t date them.
Sources
- Hero of Waterloo Hotel, Wikipedia
- Hero of Waterloo Hotel, Dictionary of Sydney (archived by State Library of NSW)
- History page, Hero of Waterloo Hotel