King Street is the central thoroughfare of the suburb ofNewtown inSydney, Australia. The residents of the area, including a higher-than-average concentration of students, LGBT people and artists, are most visible on this street, sealing Newtown's reputation as Sydney's premier hub ofsubcultures. The street can be divided geographically into two sections, North and South. King Street is particularly notable for the many picturesqueVictorian era andEdwardian era commercial buildings that line the street.

King Street New South Wales
King Street at North Newtown
General information
Type	Road
Length	2.5 km (1.6 mi)
Maintained by	Transport for NSW
Route number(s)	A36(2013–present)
Former route number	State Route 66(1992–1993) National Route 1(1955–1992) Entire route State Route 54(1993–2013) Enmore Street–City Road
Major junctions
North end	City Road Newtown, Sydney
	Enmore Road
South end	Princes Highway St Peters, Sydney
Location(s)
LGA(s)	City of Sydney
Major suburbs	Newtown
Highway system
Highways in Australia National Highway •Freeways in Australia Highways in New South Wales

King Street forms part of thePrinces Highway officially and is allocated route A36.^[1]

LikeParramatta Road, King Street is believed to follow the line of ancientAboriginal track that led from theSydney Cove area south-west across toBotany Bay. Prior toEuropean settlement, the local Aboriginal population kept the Sydney area well cleared with regular low-level fires. Colonial officerWatkin Tench recorded that during the early years of the colony, the area beyond the settlement was, in effect, open parkland, and that it was possible to walk easily across country from Sydney Cove to Botany Bay.

From the late 19th century onwards, King Street developed into a thriving retail precinct. After its initial prosperity, it became run down for much of the 20th century, when Newtown was a low-incomeblue-collar suburb, often denigrated as aslum; at the crucial time when Victorian era buildings were being demolished elsewhere, Newtown was too unfashionable to make development profitable. By this sheer luck, King Street, as a whole, is the best-preserved Victorian erahigh street in Sydney, and despitegentrification since the late 20th century, development controls ensure that this will not change.

King Street was served by a busytramway until the system's closure in 1957 (Keenan 1979). The buildings are still predominantly lateVictorian, to earlyFederation, although there are someart deco buildings as well.

North King Street, running east-north-east to west-south-west from theUniversity of Sydney (where it joins withCity Road) toNewtown railway station at the junction with Enmore Road, is a very busy thoroughfare, with heavy vehicular and pedestrian traffic the rule rather than the exception. This is the stretch that most people associate with King Street, featuring a profusion of restaurants, cafés and pubs, alongside bookshops, fashion stores and homeware retailers.

South King Street, often known as "the Paris end", running southwards from Newtown railway station toSt Peters railway station, is by contrast the down-market section, with slightly less traffic. Businesses that have been established in this stretch of King Street include cafés, antique shops and assorted small businesses. The southern end of South King Street, between Alice Street and St Peters railway station, features three theatres (New Theatre, King Street Theatre and Sydney Independent Theatre Company) and three pubs (Union Hotel, Botany View Hotel and Sydney Park Hotel).

• Dorothy Hewett's 1959 novelBobbin' Up includes a description of the dance halls and night life of King Street in the 1950s.
• The 1985 song "King St" byJohn Kennedy's Love Gone Wrong references the street and name-checks various local landmarks and characters of the time including the Coles' New World supermarket (which occupied the building which is now the Dendy Cinemas), "The Wire Man" (a local eccentric who collected wire coat hangers and scrap metal), Maurice's Lebanese restaurant (still extant) and The Hub cinema (which was operating as a pornographic cinema at the time). The music video features extensive footage of King St as it looked in 1985.
• In the mid-1980s, the Spanish Mission-style service station at 422 King Street was used as a location for scenes in theRay Lawrence filmBliss, which was based on the novel byPeter Carey. In the film, the service station was used as the childhood home of Harry Joy's wife Bettina, played byLynette Curran.
• The 1999 Australian filmErskineville Kings starringMarty Denniss andHugh Jackman features King Street in its opening sequence, and includes a scene shot in the original Gould's Book Arcade on the north end of King Street.
• The 2006 Australian drama filmCandy starringHeath Ledger andAbbie Cornish features Advance Loan Office on King Street, in the scene where the female lead prostitutes herself for money to fund her and her boyfriend's drug addiction.
• The Whitlams band became popular for its performances atThe Sandringham Hotel on King Street. The Sandringham features in their 1999 song "God Drinks at the Sando", based on John Lowe's poem "God Drinks at the Sandringham Hotel".
• King Street is referenced inThe Lemonheads' 1992 song "My Drug Buddy".^[2]
• In 2013, Sydney bandSticky Fingers filmed a music video for their songAustralia Street on King Street between Church and Brown Streets.
• In June 2014, English bandColdplay filmed a music video for their songA Sky Full of Stars on King Street between Mary and Australia Streets.^[3][4][5]

 Australian Roads portal

1.Keenan, D. (1979),Tramways in Sydney, Sydney, Australia: Transit Press.