Sydney, Melbourne, and the Picturesque: a quick field guide

'... there is a certain picturesqueness and old-fashionedness about Sydney, which brings back pleasant memories of Old England, after the monotonous perfection of Melbourne and Adelaide.'

Richard Twopeny, Town Life in Australia, 1883.

Until comparatively recently, reference to the ‘picturesque’ was a regular refrain in discussions of Australian architecture. The word has never really gone away. It is now everyday currency in heritage circles (and, with a bit less restraint, in real estate copy). The catch is that it is often used as a general synonym for ‘attractive’ rather than as a specific historical idea with its own logic.

That matters because the Picturesque (capital P) was not just a vibe. It was a particular way of reading and valuing landscapes and buildings: as scenes composed through variety, irregularity, texture, and layered visual relationships. Sydney’s topography and harbour setting make that mode of seeing feel almost intuitive. Melbourne’s dominant urban story is different: a stronger emphasis on civic order, legibility, and set-piece streetscapes, often expressed through classical planning and architecture. That contrast can be overstated, but it is still a useful lens.

Architectural historian Joan Kerr powerfully argued that Sydney’s underlying ‘character’ is Picturesque, in contrast with Melbourne’s more overtly Neo-classical inheritance. Whether you accept that as destiny or provocation, it gives us a productive question: what does ‘Picturesque’ actually mean when you are standing in a street, assessing a place, or designing change in a heritage context?

Touring the Past works across Sydney and Melbourne, and we thought it would be useful to sketch the Picturesque tradition in Australia in a way that helps readers spot its features in the wild. This is not theory for theory’s sake. In heritage practice, language becomes evidence. Being able to name what you are looking at can improve both assessment and design responses.

What the Picturesque is (and is not)

By the mid-eighteenth century, English culture had developed a deep interest in the visual qualities of planned landscapes. The Picturesque emerged from many minds, but the Reverend William Gilpin (1724-1804) is often credited with popularising it as a way of judging a place or object by its ‘fitness’ for inclusion within a picture.

Definitions then (and now) are debated. A serviceable one comes from Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829), who located the Picturesque somewhere between the Sublime and the Beautiful, and associated it with roughness, sudden variation, irregularity, and surprise. Put plainly: if a scene feels composed through texture, asymmetry, and a kind of planned informality, you are in Picturesque territory. It is not an architectural style in itself. It is a set of preferences that can travel through many styles.

The nineteenth century: an Australian heyday

By the early nineteenth century, the Picturesque had spread across multiple discourses. Via the Port Jackson colony, it influenced the emerging Australian design imagination. An early and oft-cited example is Francis Greenway’s turnpike gate on Parramatta Road (1819).

In Sydney, the Picturesque can also be read through the appetite for Gothic Revival churches, schools, and houses, as well as the appeal of comely ‘cottages ornées’ and terraces set within verdant settings. The harbour city’s love affair with water approaches and oblique views did the rest. A Picturesque place rarely offers itself front-on, all at once. It reveals itself through movement, framing, and changing sightlines.

Melbourne, meanwhile, absorbed Picturesque ideas too, even as its civic and commercial core often leaned toward a more formal classical language. ‘Coryule’ (1849-1850) is one reminder that the Picturesque was not limited to Sydney’s sandstone-and-harbour mythos.

Pen, ink and wash drawing (c.1820s) of Francis Greenway’s Parramatta Road turnpike gate, showing early nineteenth-century Picturesque ‘Gothick’ cues: an arched gable, castellated detailing, and pinnacles. Image: State Library of New South Wales (a1090017 / PXC 469/7).

The twentieth century: suburban persistence and new hybrids

The Picturesque tradition became deeply embedded in popular taste through the proliferation of architectural pattern books from the nineteenth century onward, many of which promoted variations on Picturesque domestic design. In Sydney, Government House (1837-1847, Mortimer Lewis) is an early, high-profile example of this broader taste-world.

Across the twentieth century, Picturesque principles continued to infuse suburban growth along expanding rail and tram networks in both cities. Styles that now appear constantly on heritage registers — Arts and Crafts, Federation-era domestic work, and a range of English domestic revival designs — often relied on the Picturesque toolkit: planned informality, intricate roofscapes, tactile materials, verandahs and porches as threshold spaces, and asymmetrical façades that feel ‘grown’ rather than diagrammed.

The Picturesque also attracted backlash. Critics dismissed it as sentimental or shallow, preferring the reductionism of international modernism. Yet the public did not follow the memo. Even in the austerity of the post-Second World War period, vestiges endured in the irregular massing of double- and triple-fronted cream brick veneer houses, set behind lawns, shrubs, and gently staged approaches.

A deeper dive might even trace Picturesque habits within unexpected territories — including aspects of Brutalism and the ‘Sydney School’, where the relationship between built form and landscape becomes a central aesthetic and experiential theme. That is not the Picturesque wearing the same clothes as the eighteenth century. It is the same underlying fascination with texture, shelter, and the drama of setting.

Extract from J. C. Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm and Villa Architecture (1838), widely circulated across the antipodes. Pattern-book designs like this popularised a Picturesque ‘rustic cottage’ ideal: asymmetrical compositions, decorative bargeboards, and idiosyncratic chimneys.

Perspective drawing of a single-storey Arts and Crafts house, Melbourne, showing hallmark Picturesque massing: varied gables, a lively roofscape, deep eaves, and strongly raked chimneys. Image: Usher & Kemp, 1907, State Library of Victoria (WH/HOU/242).

Why this matters in heritage consulting

When heritage places are described as ‘picturesque’ today, the word can either sharpen understanding or blur it. Used lazily, it becomes a decorative adjective. Used well, it helps explain why a place feels coherent even when it is irregular, and why certain kinds of change can jar even when they are technically ‘compliant’.

In Sydney and Melbourne heritage consulting, these distinctions are practical. They influence how we define character, how we assess setting and views, and how we argue for new work that is contemporary but not tone-deaf. The Picturesque, at its best, is not about freezing places in amber. It is about recognising the compositional logic that makes a streetscape or landscape hang together, then designing change that respects that logic without resorting to pastiche.

In his 1980s Oakleigh, Victoria series, artist Howard Arkley framed 1940s–1960s suburban housing as ‘Picturesque’: patterned, irregular, and made for the eye. Echoing the eighteenth-century Picturesque tradition, he turned everyday streetscapes into scenes fit for a painting. Image: © The Estate of Howard Arkley.

Work with us

If you are curious about the Picturesque qualities of your place—or you are navigating works in or around a heritage item, conservation area, or Heritage Overlay—Touring the Past provides independent advice across Sydney and Melbourne.

Our work ranges from brief site assessments and heritage feasibility input through to heritage impact statements, strategic advice, and more complex master planning.