City Life in Australia

 

Welcome to the world of house moving Ozzie style. In most other parts of the world house movers move furniture. In the big burgeoning Australian cities such as Brisbane it can mean actually moving the house! Here's a nice Queenslander style property being relocated, quite possibly to a big field (or in Ozzie parlance a paddock) where it can sit with many other old residential buildings until someone comes along, likes the look of it and buys to one it to a pleasant countryside plot with a view. The home seller wins twice over because they have a lovely big plot in a desirable city centre location where a super duper extra large modern house can now be built where the old Queenslander used to sit. Or a developer can build a lucrative block of flats or office building.

Up, up and away!

 Here's another option, if you've bought  a fairly small single storey property in  the city there are plenty of people called  'House Raisers' who will happily jack up  your home onto something that might  look just like a pile of wooden pallets.  Room for more living accommodation to  be built below, maybe even a separate  apartment! Building regulations seem to  be pretty lax in Brisbane, raising the  height of your house also may well  improve the view from your bedroom  quite a bit, so what if it then obstructs  the view of the people behind you,  there doesn't seem to be much they  can  do about it! We saw one fairly  dramatic example of a house where  they'd dug down to give themselves    a subterranean double garage. And  Aussie garages have to be big in order  to  accommodate all those SUV's.

Even further up!

Of course if you want the best views in the city it pays to live near the top of the highest skyscraper in town. This is what you look down on from the 82nd floor of Brisbane's Skytower. To put it into perspective in the centre of this photo is St Stephen's Catholic Cathedral which is a good sized church building. To the left of it you can just about see a smaller building, this is St Stephen's Chapel completed in 1850; at the time there were very few permanent buildings in Brisbane and a mere 2000 folk lived in the city. In due course the chapel became a cathedral but was eventually considered too small for the rapidly growing populace, hence the need for a larger one which was built next door. Incidentally the chapel's architect was a gentleman by the name of Augustin Pugin who designed a number of 19th century churches of architectural merit in the UK (many of which we have been to in recent years!) An even bigger cathedral was designed in the 1930's, this was going to be the Cathedral of the Holy Name and was intended to be the largest place of worship in the southern hemisphere. They started with the crypt which was actually built but costs escalated and money ran out  - it might have been quite something though to judge by the drawings, the dome would have been 60 feet higher than that of St Paul's in London!

Room for 4,000!