Steyne Road

(Saratoga walkies #5-ish)

Warm as toast today. Warm autumn sun, a nice cool breeze and a blue blue sky. Lovely and nippy in the mornings and warm afternoons. Perfect.



Steyne Road from the View Street Wharf Saratoga. Across the waterline there you can see 3 Federation (circa 1890 - c. 1915) cottages. Between the 2nd and 3rd is an eighties or nineties house. Looks eighties with those round columns on the veranda though the colour scheme is very now.

Behind that row of houses you can see a fifties house (white) ans another circa 1900 house (white, green roof) though that place could be right up to the 1940s.

On the right, lurking behind the palms and that lovely big frangipani, is a seventies place. There were dozens of 2 storey places built along the Brisbane Water foreshores in the seventies and you know how I hate seventies architecture.

In the last row of houses up the hill there's mostly seventies places again, short cul-de-sacs driven up into the bush during the seventies population boom. In between there's a fair amount of eighties reno's of forties houses and fresh builds. This area of Saratoga hasn't seen as many new houses and reno's as the area around Veterans Hall. The commuter ferry doesn't come round here.

Those circa 1900 houses were really tricky to photograph. From the road they're all but invisible. A lot of them've sold the backyard and there's another house in it. Though there was one place with its original mulberry tree, an elderly lemon tree, a pumpkin patch and the original dunny.



A small weatherboard cottage on Steyne Road soaking up the autumn sun. Love that faded red roof against the white boards. 1940s I'd say, judging from the age of the sides and that great mass of fishbone fern at the front, maybe once a holiday house now lived in full time but just as likely to be the family home built just after the war.



Another cottage on Steyne Road. I'd want to see the other side of this one before I put an age to it. I think the back's older than the front. The roof shape and the front look 1940s and so does that fence and gate. Those windows at the front are not narrow enough to be earlier than 1920 I think. I like the colours. Very cottage-y and smart.

This place and the photos above look across the water to Gosford, Longnose (Point Frederick) and East Gosford. Only the cemetery-cum-park on the tip of Longnose is visible at this angle. (Similar view, map)


Fillum

Went and saw Hot Fuzz yesterday. It was bloody hilarious. Pisstake, filmed in a little village Somerset, kick-arse soundtrack, Lurch, dead-beat detectives, runaway swans, explosions, murder, nutters, a priest who says "fuck off Grasshopper", high street shoot-outs and the good guys win in the end. And that bit where the guy gets clonked by a bit of Perp Dec, very funny in a very bloody way.