Sydney’s neighbourhoods

Newtown and the inner west

Twenty minutes by train from the centre and you’re in another city: Victorian brick terraces with iron lacework, a main street kilometres long, King Street, full of pubs, small theatres, second-hand bookshops, restaurants from every corner of the planet and murals. It’s the university quarter, it’s the alternative quarter and it’s where people in their twenties can afford to live.

Sydney’s nightlife moved here, and there’s a specific reason: between 2014 and 2021 the lockout laws applied, banning entry to venues after half past one and service after three.

They flattened Kings Cross, the party quarter of old, which has never got back up. Newtown fell partly outside the perimeter and absorbed what was left.

Around it are Marrickville, with the Greek and the Vietnamese, and Enmore, with the live music.

Surry Hills and Paddington

Pressed against the centre to the south and east, two neighbourhoods of Victorian terraces with cast-iron balconies, narrow streets and trees. Today they’re among the most expensive places in Australia and they’re full of cafés, restaurants and galleries. Surry Hills is the epicentre of the serious breakfast, that meal which here is an entire restaurant category.

The historical irony almost nobody mentions: these houses were built in the late nineteenth century as cheap workers’ housing, jammed together with no garden, and for much of the twentieth century they were poor quarters with a bad name. The iron on the balconies, which today is what makes them expensive, was off-the-shelf industrial ornament.

That nineteenth-century workers’ housing should be the priciest square metre in the country is a story repeated across half the world, but here you can see it in an afternoon on foot.

The eastern beaches

The strip of ocean beaches running from Bondi to Coogee is a row of coves separated by sandstone cliffs, with a path joining them along the top: six kilometres of walking with the open sea always to your left, past Tamarama, Bronte and Clovelly. Doing the whole thing is the best urban walk in the country and it’s free.

Each beach has its character and they aren’t interchangeable: Bondi is big, famous and packed, Tamarama is small and has a reputation for currents, Bronte has a rock pool and families, Clovelly is a protected inlet where you can swim calmly. That’s the genuinely useful information, more than which is prettier.

And several of them have saltwater pools cut into the rock with waves breaking over the top: they’re an Australian institution and they’re open to everyone.

The north, across the bridge

North of the harbour there’s another entire city, and how you get there says a lot about Sydney: by boat.

Manly, Mosman, Cremorne and Neutral Bay are residential suburbs hung off the northern coves, and the people who live there don’t take a car to work, they take the ferry.

Seeing people in suits stepping off a boat at half past eight in the morning is an image that sums up the city.

For a visitor, going north is interesting twice over. One, the trip: any ferry out of Circular Quay crosses the harbour and gives you the views others pay for a cruise to get.

And two, what’s there when you land: Manly has an ocean beach and the walk to the headland, Mosman has the zoo hung off the slope, with giraffes looking at the skyline, and from Taronga to Balmoral there are tracks through the harbour national park, which is bush inside the city.