Review: Kings Cross Walking Tour, Sydney with Urban Adventures

Please note: Urban Adventures no longer operates this tour. You may like to visit the points of interest covered in our review yourself, or browse the available Sydney walking tours here.

‘The red globe of light, the liquor green. You find this ugly, I find it lovely,’ wrote the eminent Australian poet Kenneth Slessor in his poem William Street.

Slessor’s words — penned in 1939 — pay homage to Sydney’s Kings Cross, which even then was awash with garish neon signs and fast gaining a reputation as a seedy red light district. Anyone who has visited Sydney is likely to have passed through the notorious Cross at some point, but few are aware of the rich and vibrant history that has shaped the area.

Colourful underworld figures, musicians, creatives and bohemians have all called the precinct home. It has been the epicentre of high profile crime cases, and housed the first high-density dwellings in Australia. It’s a district that offers no end of unexpected and surprising revelations, and one of the best ways to get a feel for its fascinating past is to join Urban Adventures on their Kings Cross Walking Tour. Titled ‘Crime and Passion’, this two-hour walking tour will transport you back to a grittier and more salacious era.

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The tour starts beneath the mammoth Coca Cola sign (possibly the best-known landmark in the area) on the bustling intersection of William Street, Darlinghurst Road and Victoria Street — the reason Kings Cross has its name. ‘It was originally called Queens Cross after Queen Victoria, but renamed Kings Cross when King Edward came to the throne,’ explains our guide Kirsty.

We head off along Victoria Street, where a discrete brass plaque in the sidewalk outside No. 202 is the only hint of the nondescript terrace’s significance. Juanita Nielsen — heiress to the Mark Foy’s department store family fortune — ran a local paper entitled Now from her home here in the 1960s.

Nielsen was an anti-development activist, and printed stories in her publication about unscrupulous property developers — whose antics included physically displacing tenants from local terraces in order to build Sydney’s first high-rise apartments. Neilsen received an invitation to attend a meeting at the nearby Carousel Club to discuss paid advertising in her newspaper. She left her home to go to the club on 4 July, 1975, and was never seen again.

‘To this day, no one knows what happened to her. Her body was never found and no one was ever convicted of her murder,’ says Kirsty. ‘It remains one of the most high-profile unsolved mysteries in Australia’s history.’

The tale of the missing heiress is the beginning of a litany of stories about intriguing local characters, including Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine — female criminals and bitter rivals who led the menacing Razor Gang Wars in the 1920s and 30s, the infamous Abe Saffron who ‘ran’ the Cross for over 40 years and whose legacy endured even longer, and Donny ‘The Glove’ Smith — a standover man who relished fighting with a lead-lined glove and was eventually gunned down on the doorstep of a local pub.

Along the way, Kirsty points out local architecture of historic importance, including St Vincent’s College — the oldest Catholic school in Sydney and still a prominent educational institution. We learn why the Chevron Hotel (once the hippest hotel in Sydney, and now an apartment block) refused to accommodate the Beatles during their Australian tour in 1964.

Overall, this Kings Cross Walking Tour is an engrossing experience — thanks to our well-informed guide. One can’t help but echo Slessor’s poetic words: ‘I find it lovely.’ Indeed.

The writer travelled as a guest of Urban Adventures.

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Additional images: Bigstock

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