Your Guide to Kensington Street, Chippendale
Qantas Travel Insider by ALEX GREIG, 24 July 2017
Just a few years ago, Kensington Street in Chippendale, occupying the badlands between Broadway and Cleveland Street and running alongside the former Carlton & United Breweries complex, was a ramshackle laneway of dilapidated terrace houses and disused sheds. One hundred years ago, it was even less desirable: its tiny two-room terraces were home to the families of brewery workers who endured air redolent of the industries based there: rotting offal odours mingled with sewage and dairy run-off and, of course, hops from the vast “city within a city” brewery that occupied 5.8 hectares. The swampy area was a virulent brew of typhoid, gastric fever and, in 1900, an outbreak of the bubonic plague. And now? Kensington Street is Sydney’s hottest dining precinct, indie retail district and burgeoning tourist hotspot. Its 16 heritage-listed 1840s terrace houses have been refurbished, incorporating many of their original features such as impossibly narrow staircases and old black stoves, and they house restaurants, cafés and boutiques. Here’s our pick of the street.