Mexico to Rome

Attached three-bay three-storey former house, built c.1820, rebuilt c.1880, having recent shopfront to front (south) elevation. Pitched slate roof having recent rooflights to front, behind rebuilt yellow brick parapet with render coping, brown brick chimneystacks. Brown brick walls, laid in Flemish bond. Square-headed window openings having cut granite sills and six-over-six pane timber sliding sash windows. Square-headed door opening with timber panelled door and overlight. Recent timber shopfront having square-headed openings and recent fittings. Situated on north side and east end of Essex Street East.

The restrained façade of the upper floors of this building shares some proportions and material characteristics with its neighbours, lending a sense of continuity to the streetscape. Although it has lost some of its original fabric, it retains its traditional form and character. The building is listed in Thom’s Directory in 1862 in use as tenements, indicating that it may have been rebuilt in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Essex Street opened in 1674 and was divided into east and west in the 1760s, with the opening of Parliament Street. The street was largely rebuilt in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.