The Strand Arcade

This guide to the Strand Arcade in Sydney opens on the morning of 25 May 1976, as fire tears through what was once the grandest shopping arcade in the Australian colonies, opened back in 1892. It follows architect Alan Lawrence, hired to rebuild the arcade exactly as it had been, and the missing nineteenth-century drawings for its eighty timber shopfronts. You'll hear what his craftsmen turned to instead, and how they used it to remake the arcade level by level. Look for the cedar staircases and cast-iron balusters as you walk beneath the tinted glass roof three storeys up.