Coles Surry Hills Parking – The Mall Story, SurryHills Posted: January 6, 2021 | By: Vanessa Berry | Filed under: Shops | Tags: shopping centers, redfern, surry hills, surry hills shopping village | 19 comments
At the end of the week, Surry Hills Shopping Village will cease business and close for good on January 10. Advertisements for apartments to be built on the site are spread across the facade, across the building, which follows the curve of the corner of Cleveland and Baptist streets. Banners announce that ‘residences’ are available for purchase, although their construction is just beginning, and in this post, a picture of a woman in an evening dress promises imminent, inappropriate luxury.
Coles Surry Hills Parking
Beneath the sign is a familiar former bank building with striped columns and two columns flanking a door with a neon sign above it, behind the Noodle Star restaurant. Many businesses in the mall have already left, but Noodle Star will trade until the end. Every table inside is taken, with others waiting on the inner steps for take-out, in the glaring yellow light of the laksa advertisement hanging at the entrance as a welcome. Along the side wall of photos of available dishes, a fair gallery of noodles and dumplings.
Redfern Suburb Review
The shopping center was built in 1981 on the site of a former factory and has maintained the same functional atmosphere since then, but above all it attracted its usefulness, which promises nothing more than a collection of useful shops gathered under the same roof. It was called Redfern Mall when it opened, but was renamed Surry Hills Shopping Village in 1992, business owners citing the fact that it was closer to the Surry Hills shopping street on Crown Street than the Redfern shops near the train station. He was later given other, more ominous names that suggested a reputation for criminality and weakness. But its longest-running story must be that it played the role of an ordinary shopping center for four decades. Some of the locals regularly shopped there, bought groceries, sent letters, visited the kiosk, and bought buns.
As I stood in the parking lot to take this photo, I was reminded of my favorite thing about Surry Hills Mall: how the parking lot behind the center follows the slope of the lot, and how the spaciousness of the parking spaces gives this dense part of the city a breathing space. I like that the center spans the corner lot and doesn’t take up more space than necessary, and that it’s surrounded by eucalyptus and casuarina trees. Inside, I love his easy radio music that gives it a faded 70’s nightclub feel, playing Fred Payne’s Band of Gold, Sweet Sweet Love – Russell Morris and other such old hits as he does today in his later days and just as he does in busier times of his past.
