POWERHOUSE COLLECTION

The Sidney Warden Archive re documenting hotels designed by Sidney Warden

Object No. 2007/61/1

Sidney Warden was the most prolific of the several architects who designed hotels for Tooth & Co. Some of the architects who worked for Tooth & Co - Sidney Ancher, Sam Lipson, Rudder & Grout - were better known, but none designed so many hotels or so many well-known hotels. By his own count, Warden's work encompassed 392 hotels, new buildings or alterations to existing hotels, including such familiar structures as the Clare, the Lansdowne, the Broadway, the Henson Park, the Marrickville, the Star, the Native Rose, the Chatswood, the Mayfair, the Tennyson, the Oxford, the Light Brigade. A pub crawl of Warden's hotels would be a lengthy occasion. During the 1930s Sydney's pub architecture came into its own, forming one of the most unusual creations of Australian architecture. In his Sydney Architecture survey, Graham Jahn emphasises its singularity: 'The Art Deco pub is an Australian phenomenon'. In fact, it was primarily a New South Wales phenomenon. Warden was at the forefront of this phenomenon and his Clare, Light Brigade, Marrickville, Tennyson and Mayfair hotels were leading examples of the genre. His 1920s hotels also took advantage of contemporary fashion, often clothed in the extravagant decoration of the Beaux Arts style which, like Art Deco, followed a France - USA trajectory to broader popularity. Apart from Australia, few countries borrowed the English licensing precedent, that bars must be accompanied by accommodation premises. Hence in most societies the architectural impact of bars was slight. However, Australian pubs diverged markedly in design from their English counterparts. During the first half of the twentieth century, English brewers chose to clothe their pubs in what architectural historian Mark Girouard described as 'Brewer's Tudor'. In contrast, Tooth & Co employed contemporary architecture to promote the image of its numerous hotels, the company's public face. In 1933 Tooth & Co general manager Tom Watson wrote, 'Hotels are our best medium for advertising and prestige'. During the following decade, Tooth & Co continued to renovate or demolish and rebuild most of the hotels in New South Wales. Tooth & Co architects were encouraged to be stylistically enterprising, so that new hotels would be 'good advertisements' for the company, and would stand out in any city or suburban street. Hence the unusual between-wars marriage of contemporary style and blue-collar bars. A significant background was the New South Wales Licensing Court's campaign to close and replace most existing hotel buildings, notorious for their unregulated and promiscuous (in all senses) mingling of entertainments and patrons. The Licensing Court's temperance-driven campaign also separated drinking from entertainment, food and women, a social disaster of far-reaching consequences. Tooth & Co could afford to replace its Victorian-era hotels with larger venues, and profited from the drinking focus of the new hotels. This unseemly alliance between wowsers and brewers created the distinctive twentieth century hotel of Sydney and New South Wales. The Sidney Warden archive is an outstanding record of New South Wales pub architecture, created by its leading practitioner. Charles Pickett, Curator, 2007