Daytime from across the Lower Fort / Windmill Street corner: the full three-storey ashlar building with splayed corner, painted lettering, hanging sign, a car and bare trees at left, neighbouring Federation-style building at right. Natural colour, no HDR.

Hero of Waterloo Hotel

81-83 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point

Built by the stonemason George Paton. 1843 to 1844. Colonial, Sydney Sandstone.

Size
Three storeys
Material
Ashlar sandstone walls, timber joinery, stone cellars
Status
State Heritage Register, 1999. Privately owned

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.

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.

The stone cellars hold tunnels and cells, and a popular legend has a secret tunnel running from the cellar to the harbour, for press-ganging drunken patrons onto ships.

The stone

Inside the bar the sandstone is left bare. Paton held a quarry lease on Observatory Hill. The blocks carry gauge marks.

Read about Sydney Sandstone

Sources

  1. Hero of Waterloo Hotel, Wikipedia
  2. Hero of Waterloo Hotel, Dictionary of Sydney (archived by State Library of NSW)
  3. History page, Hero of Waterloo Hotel