Home to some of the city's best cafes, providores and interior design stores, Sydney's industrial inner south is stylin' up.


Written By Geraldine O'Brien
The most interesting parts of any big city are those in transition.  And the most interesting time to see them is at that magical moment when the old, gritty and drab are still being rediscovered, yet before gentrification and high prices drive away the creative souls responsible for the transformation.

Driving from Sydney’s airport along old Botany Road or the soulless Eastern Distributer through Waterloo, Rosebery, Alexandria and Mascot, you’d never guess that among the factory outlets, car yards, commercial laundries and greasy-spoon diners sit some of the city’s best galleries, cafes, food distributers and produce merchants, as well as many antique dealers and auction houses deserting the established strip on Woollahra’s upmarket Queen Street.

Once home to the cream of the city’s antique dealers and the odd boutique food outlet, Queen Street has been depleted of traders, leaving just a few – Martyn Cook, Anne Schofield and Sotheby’s and Shapiro auction houses.  While more clothing and décor shops move into Queen Street, other traders invade the inner south. And they’re not alone.  Here old factories are being converted to chic offices and apartments and cafes – some very good, indeed – proliferate.  While land prices, inevitably, are on the up, the Alexandria-Waterloo-Zetland area still provides realistic opportunities for young home buyers and entrepreneurs.

Among the area’s trailblazers were Lynne Tietzel and Robin Freedman, who moved their cheese wholesaler, Australia on a Plate, into Waterloo about 10 years ago.  When the now famous Danks Street Depot opened soon after, the pair worked closely with its young chef, Jared Ingersoll, then with Barry McDonald at Fratelli Fresh.  According to Tietzel, the area’s emergence since means “residents now don’t have to get into their cars to go elsewhere for quality produce”.

Tietzel and Freedman have since moved further south still, to Mascot, where there is enough space for the semis that truck their French cheeses up from Melbourne.  But the Danks Street area they left behind, with its galleries and Ingersoll’s Danks Street Depot, is what transformed Waterloo.  Ingersoll opened the restaurant with only $5000 a tiny bank loan and a lot of favours.  Within a year the venue was winning praise and awards; two years after that, it doubled its size and this year the chef publicised a cookbook, proving ‘pride in what we do’ works better than a beach location.

This approach works for others.  Soon after Ingersoll opened the Depot, Geoff Clark shifted Country Traders from Paddington’s Oxford Street, claiming the strip had “lost its diversity and creativity and gone mass-market”.  The southern end of town, Clark says, attracts those who want “a sense of discovery”.  See it before it changes forever.

The Country Trader
Finds range from early Roman marbles to contemporary design, with the main focus on 19th and 20th century European furniture.  New spaces being developed will see stocks expand.
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