HISTORIAN AS YOUR HOST

Join a professional guide and local historian on walking route riddled with intrigue and insights as we bring Paddington’s past to life on this unique small group tour.

Drawing on historic police and court records, news stories and rare archival imagery we’ll dig beneath Paddington’s modern charms to unveil the stories behind shocking historical headlines such as:

• “Chased with an axe down Jersey Road” 
• “I stabbed her — I love her”
• “Double killing at drinks party”
• “The Night Flash cat burglar”
• “Men drugged and robbed in Kate Leigh’s house”
• “Squealing rats and rolling tins”
• “Two-up school in disused bakery”
• “A mystery of spontaneous combustion”
• “The pangs of poverty”
• “The plague in Paddington”
• “The house of death”
• “Paddington Push: nicknames and rules”
• “The Kid Bandit robs again”
• “Paddington’s gang fighting mayor”

…and many, many more.

Over 2.5 hours we’ll cross the length of this dense urban district — wandering down Paddington’s back lanes and infamous streets to uncover its secrets on foot.

ONCE UPON A TIME

Once a place of silent streams, rocky groves and important walking tracks forged by Sydney’s ancient Indigenous peoples, Paddington began its colonial life more than two hundred years ago in the form of Australia’s first legal distillery: producing rum and gin. By the 1850s it boasted a small village known for its windmills, taverns and proximity to the new Victoria Military Barracks.

Fast forward only a few decades to the 1890s and the Paddington Council claimed it possessed more rate paying houses than any other suburb in Australia. Its sandstone banks had been carved into a labyrinth of laneways, decorative terraces and bustling pubs. Steam powered trams shared the streets with private carriages transporting wealthy residents on their daily ‘commute’ to the city. While at the same time an army of industrious quarrymen, carpenters, bricklayers and stonemasons busied themselves on every block.

ONCE UPON A CRIME

…and then, the CRASH! Paddington suddenly experienced an exodus of the well-to-do residents who had  adorned their homes with marble mantle pieces and cedar staircases. Struggling tenants and boarding took over — beginning an era plagued with poverty, push gangs, sly-grog shops, cat burglars, brothels, bashings and shocking murder stories

By 1920 a Sydney health inspector would report that Paddington’s streets were the “worst place to live I have ever seen” and that the hopelessly poor tenants who inhabited the neighbourhood’s “disgusting slums” should “shoot their landlords” as they would “be better off in gaol than in these places”.  

AT A GLANCE

• 2.5 hr walking tour 
• approximately 3 km covered on foot
• Small groups of max. 15 people
• $58 per person
• Led by local Sydney historian
• Private tours available on request