Macquarie Street, Sydney

Macquarie Street is a street in the central business district of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia. Macquarie Street extends from Hyde Park at its southern end to the Sydney Opera House at its north. Apart from connecting these two major landmarks, the key government institutions of the state of New South Wales are all located on this street.

Macquarie Street is named after Lachlan Macquarie, an early Governor of New South Wales (in office 1810–1821). In the years since its founding in 1788, Sydney had developed organically, and by the early 1800s was lacking in major public buildings, and had a complex network of narrow streets. The supply of drinking water and waste management was also becoming an issue. Governor Macquarie initiated the construction of Sydney's first public buildings of any real permanence and set the boundaries of Sydney's grid of streets. With Circular Quay as the focus of this new civic scheme, Macquarie Street marked its eastern boundary and was designed as a ceremonial thoroughfare. The public buildings distributed either side of the street would both delineate and connect the civil and commercial town centre to its west with the green spaces (now the Domain and Royal Botanic Gardens) to the east.

Among the public buildings commissioned by Macquarie, Hyde Park Barracks and St James' Church are two examples largely preserved from that era. The two buildings face each other across Queen's Square, at the southern end of Macquarie Street.

Upon laying out the street in 1810, Governor Macquarie also carved out land from the Domain for the building of Sydney Hospital, with its frontage on Macquarie Street. Due to the reluctance of the British government to provide funding, the building contract for the hospital provided for the government to provide convict labour, and for part of the project costs to be paid in the form of rum import monopolies, leading to the name the "Rum Hospital". The hospital buildings were completed in 1816. Although called "elegant and commodious" by some commentators, architect Francis Greenway criticised both the design and construction. As the only major hospital in the colony at the time, the hospital took up almost the entire eastern frontage of the southern half of Macquarie Street. However, the hospital's capacity exceeded the needs of Sydney at the time, and almost from the start space in its two wing buildings began to be occupied by various government institutions. The northern wing building was occupied by the Legislative Council and Executive Council, and was eventually expanded to become the Parliament House for New South Wales. The southern wing building became the Sydney Mint, among other functions.

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