Terraces, laneways and the highest concentration of good restaurants in Australia, ten minutes' walk from Central.
Surry Hills is immediately south-east of the CBD, ten minutes on foot from Central station, and it is where Sydney eats.
It was a slum for much of its history — Ruth Park’s novel The Harp in the South, set here in the 1940s, describes overcrowded terraces, and the district had a reputation for razor gangs in the 1920s and 1930s. It was also the centre of Sydney’s rag trade and later its newspapers, with Fairfax printing here until 1995.
Gentrification arrived in the 1980s and has been thorough. The terraces are expensive, the warehouses are apartments, and the restaurants are among the best in the country.
Eating
The concentration is genuinely unusual. Crown Street and Bourke Street carry most of it, with the cross streets adding more.
Names change, so the useful thing is the shape of it: modern Australian, Japanese, Thai, Lebanese, Italian, Korean, and a strong wine-bar culture. Reservations are needed at the better places, frequently weeks ahead.
Breakfast and coffee are a Surry Hills speciality — see coffee and brunch. Queues by nine on a Saturday are normal.
Small bars
New South Wales licensing reform in 2013 created a small-bar licence, allowing venues under 100 people to open without the pokies-and-parking requirements that had produced a city of enormous pubs.
Surry Hills has the highest density of the result: basement and upstairs rooms seating thirty, often with no signage, doing cocktails or natural wine.
This is the counterweight to the lockout laws of 2014–2021, which shut a great deal of Sydney’s nightlife and are still discussed with feeling.
What else
Brett Whiteley Studio on Raper Street — the painter’s converted warehouse studio, kept as he left it in 1992, run by the Art Gallery of NSW and free. Open limited days; check before going.
Surry Hills Library, an award-winning 2009 building on Crown Street, and the market in the park outside on the first Saturday of the month.
Bourke Street cycleway, one of the first separated bike lanes in Sydney.
Around it
Darlinghurst to the north-east — similar, with Victoria Street and the Kings Cross end. Redfern and Waterloo to the south. Chippendale to the west, with Spice Alley, White Rabbit Gallery and the Central Park development with its cantilevered heliostat.
Practicalities
Ten minutes on foot from Central; light rail runs along Devonshire Street.
It is safe and busy. Parking is very difficult.
