NSWFarming
Glebe
Church land that became a suburb of villas and terraces.
1828Church glebe offered for sale
WHAT STARTED IT
In 1790 a tract west of Sydney Town was measured out as glebe land, meant to support the colony’s Church of England chaplain. Richard Johnson found it heavily timbered and useless for crops, so in 1828 the trustees of Clergy and School Lands offered it in lots, and those lot lines still shape Glebe’s streets.
WHAT SUSTAINED IT
Merchants and officials built villas on the high ground at Glebe Point, while slaughterhouses and boiling-down works crowded the swampy shore of Blackwattle Bay. The Municipality of the Glebe was proclaimed in 1859, and terraces filled most of the suburb between the 1870s and 1915, by which time it was a working-class district. In 1972, after resident protests and union green bans, the state road authority gave up a planned expressway through Glebe.
TURNING POINTS
1828The trustees of Clergy and School Lands offer the Sydney glebe in 14 lots of 15 to 40 acres, leased with the right to buy.
1831Lawyer George Allen moves into Toxteth House, the centre of his 95-acre estate at Glebe Point.
1859The Municipality of the Glebe is proclaimed on 1 August.
1880Glebe Town Hall is completed on St Johns Road.
1901The suburb has 19,220 people living in 3,737 houses.
1974The Commonwealth buys the church’s Bishopthorpe and St Phillip’s estates to keep them for low-income families.
WHAT IT DOES NOW
An inner-west suburb of restored Victorian terraces, with Glebe Point Road running down to the foreshore of Blackwattle and Rozelle bays.