But then its original charm had always been an arguable point. There were a few old-timers who recalled peaceful rolling hills, grand estates and sheep grazing in nearby Hyde Park. Others romanticised the turn of the century when the ‘larrikin pushes’ — the hooligan street gangs — pelted each other with ‘Irish confetti’, a mixture of gravel and broken bricks. And for some, Surry Hills was at its most alluring in the 1920s when the hardened criminals took over and business boomed for the sly grog and cocaine traders. So, when the Council started systematically demolishing whole blocks of Surry Hills under the guise of ‘cleaning up the rat-infested inner city streets', the die-hard residents pragmatically decided that it was just another phase the suburb was going through. Many of them refused to be pushed out of their homes to make way for the businesses, warehouses and factories that would command higher rates for the Council and higher rentals for the landowners. Surry Hills was a residential area, they said.
