The brickworks in St. Peters were built in the 19th century and operated till 1948. From the street the towering chimneys and kilns look like well preserved heritage, fronting the rolling hills of Sydney Park. However if you take a moment and look closer, maybe even wander around the back you will notice that they have now been adapted to another use.

That is the home for some of Sydney’s homeless. Old mattresses, crude cooking implements and makeshift doors populate what were once the entrances to the kilns.

Walk around a bit more and peer through the grates that now cover the entrances to the large kilns. You will see abandoned tools and machines from a bygone era. A time when a days work was up to twelve dirty, hot hours. Listen and you might even hear the murmurs of the ghosts of the dreams and hopes that this place once housed. Imagine the stories of the men who worked there. Maybe content in their labors or maybe doing the only thing they could to keep some food on the table during the hard-times of 1930’s life in Sydney. Now step away and look once again at the crude, cold temporary homes of the forgotten and neglected… and ask yourself is anything really any different.

This is the view from the street. The preserved chimneys and machinery of the old brickworks against the backdrop of what is now Sydney Park, which was built on the old clay pits that provided the brickworks with their raw materials.

Behind the elegant preserved facade you will discover the new role the brickworks play in the lives of the local residents

Behind the metal grates are relics from the brickworks history, from a time when they provided much needed employment in the area’s of Sydenham  and St Peters.