THE CACHE is located in a rich historic site of Paddington, house to many heritage buildings and the grounds to a famous weekend market. So the area can get quite busy, so please use as much stealth as possible to search for the cache.
HISTORY OF THE PLACE - Newcombe ad Gordon streets are named after early landowners, George William Newcombe and Charles Gordon. Gordon's Mill, a wind-powered flour mill which stood near Stewart Place, was a Paddington landmark until the 1870s.
In 1850 the Wesleyan Methodists (now Uniting Church) built the first church in Paddington after they were granted the block of land bounded by Newcombe, Gordon, Elizabeth and Oxford streets. The small weatherboard chapel stood where the George Smith Memorial Hall is now - behind the current stone church, which opened in 1877.
On the western corner of Newcombe and Gordon streets, a coach building workshop, Paddington Coach Works, operated from 1898 to 1916. An Open-air picture theater took over part of the site from 1912. A new two-storey brick theater, 'The Oxford', opened in 1925. It featured vaudeville acts between films until World War 2 and was said to be 'on a par with the Tivoli'. When television arrived in 1959 theater audiences declined. The theatre closed in the early 1960s and it was demolished in 1982.
Paddington gained its name when one of the first landowners, James UnderWood, subdivided his property in 1839. He called it the Paddington Estate, after the borough of Paddington in London.
Paddington grew around the houses of the stonemasons, quarrymen, carpenters and laborers who worked on building Victoria Barracks, which opened in 1848. Grocers, bakers, butchers, tailors, bootmakers and others set up shops along the Old South Head Road, to serve the growing population. The road was renamed Oxford Street in 1875 after the famous London High Street.
Paddington Public School, next to the cache, was originally built of corrugated iron and opened in 1856. It was rebuilt in 1869-74. It is one of the oldest continually operating schools in NSW. The Uniting Church was built in 1877 for the Methodist congregation. Today, the popular Paddington Markets are held on Saturdays in the grounds of the church and school. The markets began in 1973 to encourage local craftspeople and to raise funds for welfare work.
EXTRA - HISTORIC TRIVIA
HORSE BUSES - Whilst the railways brought easy access to the communities on the outskirts of Sydney, buses and trams provided the necessary transport to the inner suburbs. Horse buses were the only form of public transport until the advent of trams - first horse drawn, and later electric powered - in the 1860s, when the two locked horns in a battle for supremacy. A survey of Sydney's public transport system in 1889 showed that 45 companies ran horse buses, operating services linking Sydney with Alexandria, Balmain, Pyrmont, Glebe, Roselle, Macdonaldtown, Redfern, Eveleigh, Forest Lodge, Darlington, Chippendale, Newtown, Erskineville, Belmore, Canterbury and Ryde.