SHIFTING A CATHEDRAL

Evening Post, Volume CXI, Issue 76, 30 March 1926, Page 6

SHIFTING A CATHEDRAL

ST. ANDREW'S IN SYDNEY.

(From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, 25th March,

Once again thero is talk of shifting St. Andrew's Cathedral, the '• principal ecclesiastical edifice in Sydney. Tho present site, alongside the Town Hall in George street, has been hold by the Anglican Church for more than a century. It is distinctly historical. Round it are a thousand hallowed memories, and to some churchmen the idea of removing it is unthinkable, especially in the belief that it can be architecturally enriched and ennobled where it now stands. Others again contend that only by shifting to a larger site can Sydney and the church have an Anglican Cathedral worthy of the great city of the future. At any rate,, the opportunity has arisen to erect on a new site a noble architectural pile comparable with somo of the stately structures of the Old World, now that the question of the demolition of tho present building has been raised, in order to make way for the underground railway, one of the stations of which will immediately front the present site and also the Town Hall. Thero is the fact also that St. Mary's Cathodral, already a stately building, will be of noble and imposing proportions when the original^plans are fully carried out, and will _warf into insignificance what is generally regarded as the miniature Anglican cathedral of to-day. The Government, for the purposes of the underground railway, has made the Anglican body a straight-out offer of a now cathedral site at Church Hill, and a grant of £500,000. It is a tidy and tempting offer to not a few of the Anglican churchmen who are not influenced by the traditions and sentiment which cling about the present site. Church Hill, which is about two-thirds of a mile away from the present site, and in tho somewhat uncongenial neighbourhood of Miller's Point, and now the eminent domain of two of the exclusive hotels and several churches. Because of its eminence, although some of the surroundings are not so aristocratic as thoy might be, Church Hill would afford a fine site for a new cathodral worthy of the city. Whatever the outcome of the negotiations, the opportunity of erecting a magnificent pile on a new city site will be lost forever in a year or two. The position has got the Anglican churchmen thinking-