Little house lost: The plan to bury this historic wooden worker’s cottage beneath a $33m tower

In 1905, a boilermaker called Thomas Eardley constructed a humble single-storey wooden worker’s cottage at Kogarah in southern Sydney. 

Just three years earlier, Eardley had migrated to Sydney from South Australia and called the cottage after his hometown of Hindmarsh.

Some 118 years on, it’s fair to say that Eardley could never have imagined the fate awaiting his  modest Victoria St home.

A development application has been lodged with Georges River Council to retain the cottage but construct a major 12-storey 100-unit development around it.

It is likely to be a jarring and incongruous sight – the front section of a single-storey wooden cottage sitting at the bottom of a high-density residential development. 

It’s also a sight that could become more common, as Sydney’s insatiable demand for more housing means high-density precincts shift into historic low-density areas containing existing heritage items.

So how did the scenario above come about? Is it an outcome which should be approved? And is better planning needed for these types of situations?

The area in which the home was located was rezoned to high-density housing back in 2017, as part of a review of the Kogarah local environmental plan. 

Hindmarsh was one of a sprinkling of existing heritage items in the precinct.

It had been heritage-listed by 2003 (and potentially earlier) as a result of being “a relatively rare representative example of a modest single-storey weatherboard cottage” which displayed “excellent Federation Arts and Crafts stylistic influence”. 

The listing also states the cottage was “an important contributor to the historical development of the Kogarah Township Estate”

The planning proposal which promoted the rezoning didn’t seem to have any focus on how to marry both conservation of the existing heritage items and the proposed new residential towers.

It doesn’t look to be until 2021 that detailed planning controls were introduced for the precinct (known as Kogarah North) via a Development Control Plan (DCP). 

Even these controls were more of a wish-list than prescriptive, including stating that new development should “relate to heritage buildings with appropriate setbacks, low rise podium and other scale breaking devices in adjacent development” and that “future development adjacent to heritage listed buildings (should be) sympathetic to the heritage item”.

The matter is now in the hands of Georges River Council planners, who will assess the  application for the Southern Sydney Regional Planning Panel. 

The Council’s planners have already told the panel that the cottage’s integration is one aspect of the proposal which they will closely scrutinise.

The site’s developers say the application “has been specifically designed to celebrate and meaningfully incorporate the retained heritage item as an integral part of the development, rather than a residual element.”

“The most viable use for the cottage which will also contribute positively to the neighbourhood, is as a café, to serve the surrounding residents,” the application says.

“An associated outdoor area provides a curtilage around the cottage to allow it to be appreciated in the round, and in particular for the eastern side of the cottage where the entrance and awning is located to be prominent within the streetscape.”

On a neighbouring development site, which is already under construction, two heritage-listed terraces are being retained and form the base of an 11-storey development. 

Alongside the terraces, the lower floors of the development have been designed to mimic the terrace style, in what looks to be a more successful heritage integration than what is happening on the Hindmarsh site.

The fate of Hindmarsh is a reminder that it’s not appropriate to plan cities through generic ‘pattern book’ style development or broad-brush zonings – there are complications and historic layers to areas which require site-specific outcomes.

If a rezoning is happening in an area with a range of heritage items and features, it’s reasonable that it is clear upfront how this heritage will be protected and enhanced. That doesn’t appear to have happened here.

My view is that, if approved, the Hindmarsh development site is probably going to become one of Sydney’s great urban oddities. 

This is because it’s hard to see how a modest early 20th century wooden worker’s cottage – built for a South Australian boilermaker – will easily sit at the base of a modern 12-storey concrete, steel and glass tower. 

However, given there are no planning controls in place which require development to be setback from the cottage, it’s also hard to think of a more satisfactory outcome. 

It could also become a planning outcome which gains acceptance over time as a quirky compromise of forms between heritage and housing.