Hyde Park Barracks Domes Restoration Project

Admired today for its fine proportions and truth to materials, the Hyde Park Barracks had a history of ad hoc adaptation and poor maintenance as a result of its institutional use. The guardhouse domes were removed by the mid 1860s. The southern guardhouse was subsumed into a residence with the demolition of two of its walls. The Barracks compound’s south-western pavilion was demolished for road widening in 1918, destroying the symmetry of the Macquarie Street elevation.

In the 1930s it was intended to replace the Hyde Park Barracks for a new courts complex. This did not eventuate, partly as a result of World War II. In 1979, with a new appreciation of early colonial architecture, it was decided to convert the Mint and Hyde Park Barracks to museums of social history and the decorative arts administered by the Museum of Applied Arts & Sciences. Both properties were transferred to the Historic Houses Trust in 1990. Today, the paired guardhouses’ divergent histories may be read in the fabric of their walls, which have undergone conservation in one case and reconstruction in the other.

The Hyde Park Barracks as a central block set within a courtyard bounded by buildings housing a variety of support functions had late 18th – early 19th century British architectural precedents.

John Plaw published a design for a hunting box with twin lodges in his Ferme Ornée (London, 1795), an architectural pattern book used by John Macarthur for stable buildings at Camden, NSW. HHT curator, Scott Hill has pointed out close similarities between the composition of Plaw’s Hunting Box and the front wall of the Barracks. Just look at those gate houses with their perky domes as well as the piers guarding the entrance.

Image: John Plaw, Hunting Box from Ferme Ornée (London, 1795), Historic Houses Trust, Caroline Simpson Library & Research collection

James Kerr, in his Design for Convicts writes that Greenway’s design of the Barracks compound was a simple and recognisable eighteenth century arrangement as seen in John Wyatt’s 1777 design for an agricultural complex – Hatch Farm, in Essex, England.

Image: Hatch Farm, Essex, England, from James Kerr, Design for Convicts (1984)

Another interesting parallel for Hyde Park Barracks is the Workhouse, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, England (1824), a three storey institution set within a compound which was compartmentalized according to the genders and classes of the inmates.

The Workhouse, Southwell, Nottinghamshire, sourced from panoramio

See www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-theworkhouse/