The Sydney Town Hall is a late 19th-century heritage-listed town hall building in the city of Sydney, the capital city of New South Wales, Australia, housing the chambers of the Lord Mayor of Sydney, council offices, and venues for meetings and functions. It is located at 483 George Street, in the Sydney central business district opposite the Queen Victoria Building and alongside St Andrew's Cathedral. Sited above the Town Hall station and between the city shopping and entertainment precincts, the steps of the Town Hall are a popular meeting place.
It was designed by John H. Wilson, Edward Bell, Albert Bond, Thomas Sapsford, John Hennessy and George McRae and built from 1869 to 1889 by Kelly and McLeod, Smith and Bennett, McLeod and Noble, J. Stewart and Co. It is also known as Town Hall, Centennial Hall, Main Hall, Peace Hall, Great Hall and Old Burial Ground. The Town Hall is listed on the (now defunct) Register of the National Estate and the New South Wales State Heritage Register and is part of the heritage-listed Town Hall precinct which includes the Queen Victoria Building, St Andrew's Cathedral, the Gresham Hotel and the former Bank of New South Wales. In latter years, it has been discovered that Town Hall lies on top of part of a cemetery complex. Renovations were undertaken in 2008-9 primarily to upgrade the mechanical, hydraulic, electrical and communication services within the building. The renovations, completed by Kell & Rigby, included removing of sandstone from underneath the building.
History
The Sydney Town Hall is built within the former Old Sydney Burial Ground. The cemetery was Sydney's first permanent cemetery and it is estimated that at least 2,000 burials were made in the Old Sydney Burial Ground between 1792 and 1820. The cemetery boundary originally extended into George Street and up to the southern side of Druitt Street. The cemetery was Sydney's first permanent cemetery, burials previously being reported in land adjacent to the Military Barracks and in the Rocks. The cemetery was set out in September 1792 by Governor Phillip and the Reverend Richard Johnson on land that had belonged to Marine Captain Shea (buried there in 1789) and the first interments presumably took place from this time. More land was added on the northern and western sides of the cemetery in 1812. The cemetery was closed in 1820 when the Sandhills or Brickfield cemetery (now Central railway station) was opened.
The majority of the people who died in Sydney would have been buried there, convict and prominent citizen alike, unless they were buried on their own land. Certain parts of the cemetery were set aside for particular people or groups (i.e. New South Wales Corps' area was near the Druitt and George Street Corner).
After it closed in 1820 the state of the cemetery deteriorated so that in 1845 evidence was given to a committee inquiring into its future that most of the graves were no longer marked and that it would be impossible to find them without clearing the land down to coffins. Notice was given in The Sydney Morning Herald that remains of the interred "so far as they can by reasonable search be discovered" would be reburied at Rookwood Cemetery. Since that time, works in the vicinity of the Town Hall regularly expose remains of graves.