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A convict sketch drawn three months after the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove on 26 January 1788, shows the area around what is now Bakehouse Lane was occupied by the house and garden of Lieutenant Bell, the General Hospital and garden, the colony's bakehouse and women's camp. James Rampling, a baker, purchased land here in 1830. Rampling built and operated a bakehouse there until he was evicted in 1825 by Thomas Ryan, chief clerk in the Principal Superintendent Office of Convicts.

Nos. 121, 123-125 George Street, which adjoin the lane, are typical examples of late Victorian small scale shop and residence/terrace type buildings. No. 121, a former bakery, is a relatively rare surviving example of such a facility constructed in 1922. Although now partly removed, some of the peel back oven remains, including the iron doors, front wall to the oven and tools which allow the interpretation of an early traditional oven and bakery.

Named by the Sydney Cove Authority in the 1970s due to the close proximity to the site of Sydney's first hospital. Many of the 736 convicts who survived the voyage of the First Fleet from Portsmouth, England arrived suffering from dysentery, smallpox, scurvy, and typhoid. Soon after landing Governor Phillip and Surgeon-General John White established a tent hospital along what is now George Street in The Rocks to care for the worst cases. Subsequent convict boatloads had even higher rates of death and disease. A portable hospital which was prefabricated in England from wood and copper arrived in Sydney with the Second Fleet in 1790. Present-day Nurses Walk in The Rocks cuts across where the early hospital once stood.

John White (c. 1756 - 20 February 1832) was born in the townland of Drumaran, near Belcoo, in County Fermanagh in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, about 1756. He entered the Royal Navy on 26 June 1778 as surgeon's mate aboard HMS Wasp. He was promoted surgeon in 1780, serving aboard HMS Irresistible until 1786 when Sir Andrew Hamond recommended him as principal naval surgeon for the voyage of the First Fleet to Australia. As Surgeon-General of New South Wales he organised a hospital for the new colony, but was somewhat hampered by a lack of medical supplies. He became interested in the native flora and fauna of the new land and investigated the potential of Australian plants for use as medicine. He observed the olfactory qualities of eucalyptus and distilled eucalyptus oil in 1788. White wrote 'A Journal of a Voyage to New South Wales' (1790), which described many Australian species for the first time.

According to his journal, White severely disliked Australia, describing it as: "a country and place so forbidding and so hateful as only to merit execration and curses." He applied for leave of absence in 1792, and received it in 1794, sailing for England on 17 December 1794 and later travelled to Ireland. In 1796 he resigned his position when given the option of returning to Australia. For 20 years he was stationed first at Sheerness from 1799 and then at Chatham Dockyard from 1803. He retired on a half pension in 1820, and died in Worthing, England in 1832. Sydney's White Bay is named in his honour.

Was originally an extension of Kendalls Lane until 1905, when the area was cleared, re-built and the new street was named Playfair Lane. Re-aligned and given its present name by the Sydney Cove Authority in the 1970s. The names recalls Lawrence Kendall (1818-1881) who in 1861 acquired a steam mill operated by Berkelman and Bate there. He converted the mill building into what was renamed Kendall's Biscuit Factory. In 1845, Kendall had built a flour mill at the southern end of Queen Street, Campbelltown. The Mill House in Campbelltown still stands. Flour from the mill was used in the manufacture of biscuits at the Mill Lane factory.

In 1889 Kendall & Sons, biscuit manufacturers, are recorded as the occupants of No. 24 Mill Lane, adjoining the factory. In 1900 the land was resumed under the Observatory Hill Act. By 1925 a two storey building had been erected on the site, described as a factory, and owned by John Turnbull. Between 1925-49 it continued to be listed as a factory or workshop. In 1970 control of the land was vested in the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority and in 1978 the Authority began an extensive redevelopment project on the site. Turnbull's 1925 building was renamed Penrhyn House.

This narrow alley's name in general usage from the early 1800s. It of the few lanes from the Rocks which survived the clean-up and mass demolitions after the Bubonic Plague of 1901. So named either as a pun on the word "sewers", or because of its narrowness and it being a thoroughfare between two separate sections of The Rocks. Suez Canal was one of the most unsavoury places in Sydney in its time. It was haunted by prostitutes and larrikins, there were brothels, sly grog shops and an opium den. At the end of a laneway in the courtyard near the British Seaman s Hotel locals gathered to place their bets on blood sports like cock fighting. It was a brave or foolish person who wandered down the alleyways of The Rocks at night.

Of an adjoining alley, Henry Lawson wrote: "As the night was slowly falling over city, town and bush, From a slum in Bludgers Alley slunk the Captain of the Push, And his whistle loud and piercing woke the echoes of The Rocks, And a dozen ghouls came sloping round the corners of the blocks" (The Captain of the Push). Most cities have their version of Sydney s Larrikins, young men out for a good time and trouble, they organised themselves into street gangs that were known as 'Pushes'. The gangs were engaged in running warfare with other Sydney gangs of the time such as the Straw Hat Push, the Glebe Push, the Argyle Cut Push, the Forty Thieves from Surry Hills and the Gibb Street Mob. They conducted such crimes as theft, assault and battery against police and pedestrians in the Rocks area. Female companions of the Push, called Donah s,  would entice drunks and seamen into dark areas to be assaulted and robbed by the gang.

Women were warned never to go near Suez Canal, there were stories of young women who were kidnapped and forced to work in the brothels where the women were not much more than sex slaves. Ruth Park wove this into her novel of The Rocks Playing Beatie Bow  where the heroine, Abigail, is abducted and forced into a disused warehouse full of unsavory characters. Fortunately she is rescued before we find what hideous fate her abductors had in mind for her.

A short lane that runs between Long Lane to Cribbs Lane, between and parellel to Cambridge and Cumberland Streets. The first European settlers erected dwellings in the area around Carahers Lane and Longs Lane soon after their arrival in the colony. While little remains of building development pre 1850s, the layout of the allotments and laneways remain.

Carahers Lane was created by developers in the 1830s to provide access between Cribbs Lane and Longs Lane to the south. This took place when George Cribb's property was subdivided and sold off after Cribb fell upon hard times. On Carahers Lane six two-storey terraces were built, with three more on Cribbs Lane. Over the next 70 years these, and other houses on the site, were occupied by immigrants and their families from Europe.
Carahers Lane is named after Owen J. Caraher who owned and lived on land fronting Gloucester Street and Long's Lane in the 1870s.

In 1900, the land around the 'Big Dig' site (some on the YHA site having been preserved by erecting the youth hotel on stilts) included around 50 dwellings, 2 pubs, 3 shops and 3 interconnecting lanes which linked the area into The Rocks as a whole. The 'Big Dig' site had been open space since the demolition of a large shed in the 1930s. The shed, an engineering workshop built in 1917, had itself taken the place of some 30 houses and shops, the earliest built in 1795, which were demolished arg 1900.
The footprints of those 30 or so buildings remain intact and preserved for posterity, and are a facinating link to the very first buildings back when The Rocks was a densely populated maritime village.
More than 750,000 items have been excavated at the dig site, which includes a well down which Chinese porcelain bowls painted in silver with flower designs, English dinner plates and side plates, and George Cribb's butcher's knife, so sharp that you could still cut meat with it. Children's toys, decorative jewellery and Chinese ceramics, which had fallen  or been swept  between the floor boards of the original buildings, are among the finds. Many are on display at The Rocks Discovery Museum.

The Whaler's Arms Hotel

Maori Lane was named for the Maori whalers who lived there. It was here that New Zealanders first brought Maori culture to Australia. A significant number of Maori entering Australia may have also been slaves in the Bay of Islands who were fleeing a life of captivity, mirroring the way escaped Australian convicts often made for New Zealand.

After the 1840s and 1850s, when Maori were still a notable presence in Australia given the whaling trade, the export of their produce to the Australian colonies, and the presence of a number of them trying their luck on the Australian goldfields. The Whaler's Arms Hotel, the former home of butcher George Cribb, was on the corner of Maori Lane and Cribbs Lane.

Longs Lane runs between Cumberland Street and the southern end of Gloucester Street. In 1807 there were buildings documented in this area and Longs Lane had been established by this time. The lane is Heritage Listed as it is indicative of the nineteenth and early-twentieth century residential character of The Rocks, and is one of the few remaining laneways which criss-crossed The Rocks in the nineteenth century, having retained its original scale and orientation. Parts of the lane is paved with the original flagstones.

Between 1905 and 1915, the buildings on the nearvy 'Big Dig' site were demolished and, in the 1920s, major demolition took place nearby for the Harbour Bridge approach. In the 1950s, several houses to the south of Long's Lane were demolished when the Cahill Expressway was constructed. The Sydney Cove Authority undertook the conservation and restoration of the buildings and rear yards of 103-117A Gloucester and 130-142 Cumberland Streets, and the conservation and reopening of the two historic laneways, Long's and Carahers Lanes. The work involved the retention of as much of the significant fabric as possible from the various stages of the buildings' and lanes' lives, and was carried out in a number of stages from 1992-97.

The name racells William Long, who was formally granted land here in 1839. A former convict, Long arrived in Sydney aboard the Baring in 1815, but by 1829 was a successful wine and spirits merchant as well as being licensee of pubs in Millers Point and Lower George Street. William Long was formally granted land adjacent to the lane in 1839, legitimising his claim to ownership of the property. Long built a group of eight single-storey brick tenements with shingle roofs, containing two rooms each. By 1845, a two-storey, three room building with a shingled roof had been erected upon the site at the corner of Long's Lane and Cumberland Street, possibly on the site of two of Long's 1830 tenements. In 1853 Long's daughter Isabella married James Martin, who subsequently became the registered owner of the property, now a hotel. Martin later served as Chief Justice of the NSW Supreme Court, was the Premier of New South Wales on three separate occasions, and is the person after whom Martin Place is named.

Following an outbreak of the Bubonic plague in Sydney and The Rocks the NSW Government, under The Rocks Resumption Act (1901), resumed the area, and most properties in the area were demolished. From 1912, the Housing Board built some 30 units in one development along Gloucester, Cumberland and Little Essex streets. Parts of the Gloucester / Essex / Cumberland Streets Housing Board development were demolished in the 1920s to make way for the approaches to the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The remainder of the development was demolished with the construction of the Cahill Expressway in the 1950s to make way for the new freeway. 140-142 Cumberland Street continued to be tenanted through the 1970s. The last house was vacated in the 1980s when the house was boarded up. Between 1994 and 1995, an extensive programme of conservation works was carried out on the building.

Commemorates Francis Greenway, Colonial Architect under Gov. Macquarie whose office was in a George Street building nearby. Greenway was Australia's first great architect-the "grand stylist" of early Sydney. Born in Bristol, England, in 1777 to a building family, in his mid-30s Greenway was found guilty of forging a financial document and sentenced to death (later commuted to 14 years transportation). He arrived in Sydney as a "gentleman convict" in 1814 and immediately impressed Governor Macquarie, who allowed him to set up Australia's first private architecture practice, which was in George Street.

He was granted a full pardon in 1818 after completion of the Macquarie Lighthouse, and went on to design many of Sydney's buildings including the Female Factory in Parramatta, the District Courts, St James Church, Queen's Square and the brilliant St Matthews at Windsor. Greenway also introduced the first Australian system of progress payments for work completed.

Commissioner Bigge's review of colonial expenditure cancelled many of Greenway's larger projects, describing his work as "too grand for an infant colony." Greenway was dismissed after Macquarie's departure in 1822, but refused to vacate his government-built house until his death in 1837.

Greenway was commemorated on Australia's first ten dollar note, issued at the introduction of Decimal Currency on 14th February 1966. It is ironic that Greenway arrived in Australia as a convict, whose crime was forgery, and that, when 'his' notes were issued they were the ones that were subject to counterfeiting on a large scale! The notes remained in circulation until 1984.

Named by the Sydney Cove Authority in the 1970s due to the close proximity of the site of Sydney's first hospital, which operated from 1788 to 1816. On some early maps, it is marked as Cambridge Street.

The colony's first hospital was constructed here in 1788 and included a herb garden to help assist in treatment due to a shortage of drugs. The second hospital was a portable hospital which arrived with the Second Fleet in June, 1790. The portable hospital was constructed in less than a fortnight and was soon filled with over 400 patients. Nurses were selected from convicts to work in the first roughly constructed hospitals.

In the very early years of the Colony at Sydney Cove, a number of tracks wending their way up from the harbour were beaten out by the early colonial settlers who built the first dwellings there. Cribbs Lane was one of these lanes, pre-dating Cumberland and Gloucester Streets and the rest of the regularised street pattern created in 1810. Ann Armsden and her First Fleeter husband, George Legg, first built a house beside the lane around 1795. Following George's death in a boating accident on the harbour in 1807, Ann married her neighbour, baker George Talbot and rebuilt their house in stone.

Irish rebel, Richard Byrne, lived here from around 1805. Byrne was a stonemason, and may have been responsible for some of the quarrying for his neighbours' houses. One pre-1820s quarry can still be seen, and it is most likely houses here were constructed by Byrne using materials from the site. For fresh water, a number of wells were cut into the rock. A well dug by the Byrne family has a few steps cut into the sandstone leading to it. It was here, or a similar well in Cumberland Street, that a small child drowned in 1810. The Byrne family remained here until the 1850s. Their descendants can still be found living in The Rocks area.



Butcher George Cribb, after whom the lane is named, was also a convict, and purchased a house at 28 Cambridge Street where he lived and operated a slaughter yard until the late 1820s. He worked for the government as part of his sentence, and in his own time he slaughtered cattle, sheep and pigs and sold the meat for consumption within the colony, or to ships leaving Sydney. His slaughterhouse was in the centre of his property.

• More about George Cribb

The name recalls the steam flour mill and biscuit factory of Lawrence Kendall which operated here from the 1860s (see Mill Lane above). Mill Lane was originally an extension of Kendall's Lane until 1905, when the area was cleared, re-built and the new street was named Playfair Lane.

Samson's Cottage
8 Kendall Lane (1844): The original two storey cottage had stone and brick walls and a shingle roof and was pulled down in 1883, however parts of the northern, western and southern walls of the building still remain (photo below). It was built for stevedore William Samson. The cottage was built on a parcel of land was that part of the proposed 2nd stage of Sydney Hospital that was never built. William Balmain was granted a lease which included this lot, and by 1807 he had released the property to the Government. By March 1837 William Carr and George John Rogers were trustees of the property and in October 1838 Sir George Gipps granted the land to Carr and Rogers. In February 1839 Frederic Wright Unwin became the owner of the property who conveyed to William Samson, a stevedore.

Samson completed the erection of a two-storey house to the rear of the lot in 1844. The three roomed house was constructed of stone and brick walls and the roof was clad in shingles. Following Samson's death in 1882, his wife Martha Samson sold the property. Alexander William Cormack, a subsequent owner, had the shop on George Street and part of the cottage pulled down to make way for a three-storey building containing two shops to George Street and lodging rooms over. In 1991-92 a new infill building was constructed on the site of Samsons Cottage incorporating the remaining sections of the former house. The form of the new building is similar to that of the original cottage, built in 1844 and demolished in the 1920s.



The Rocks Discovery Museum: Three historic sandstone buildings in The Rocks have been restored to become The Rocks Discovery Museum. Entry to the museum is free; it tells the story of The Rocks area of Sydney from pre-European days to the present. The museum is home to a unique collection of images and archaeological artefacts found in The Rocks  some of which you can even hold.
The exhibits are filled with interactive fun, using touch screens, audio and visual elements to bring the history of the area alive. Four permanent exhibitions have been developed in close consultation with the Metropolitan Aboriginal Land Council which share the history and stories of the area and the impact of European settlement.

The Coach House: a rare surviving example of a large stable with stores and workshops above in Sydney, dating from 1853. Historically, the Coach House was part of the industrial nature of The Rocks and makes up part of The Rocks, an area that conveys very clearly the character of Sydney's mid to late 19th century period of development. 4-6 Kendall Lane, The Rocks. 1853-1854