The claim
A three-storey sandstone pub on the hill above Walsh Bay, built by stonemason George Paton in the 1840s and little altered since 1928. Log fires, hand-chiselled walls and weekend jazz set the mood. Below the bar lie stone cellars, star of the ghost tours and of a persistent legend about a smugglers' tunnel to the harbour.
What the records show
The State Heritage Register has the land sold by a man named Clarke to the builder George Payten in 1840; Payten built the Garrison Church in 1842 and this hotel in 1843-44, and took out a licence in the name Hero of Waterloo in 1845. The stone for both church and hotel probably came from the Kent Street quarries, the earliest in Sydney. The register also explains the room a drinker stands in: the present main bar was two rooms until the dividing partition was taken out in 1928. The story that the building was a convict-built barracks of about 1804 is disputed, and the smugglers' or press-gang tunnel to the harbour is folklore. The register records the current use as pub, bar and restaurant. A second publisher now carries the same house. The Dictionary of Sydney, the city's scholarly reference work, archived in 2021, has an entry written by Terri McCormack in 2010 and corrected in March 2022, and it is firmer than the register on the two dates that matter here: the hotel was built in 1844 by George Paton, a stonemason and builder — the Dictionary says the spelling Payten is sometimes cited in error — who had bought the Windmill Street land from John Clarke and had built the Garrison, or Holy Trinity, Church in 1842, and Paton obtained the first licence for his Hero of Waterloo on 30 June 1845. So the year on the pub's sign is the building's, not the licence's, and the licence has a day and a month. The Dictionary's building record adds the run of publicans behind the counter: Paton himself from April to September 1845, then Thomas Kirkman, who had kept the Coach and Horses in Brown Bear Lane in the Rocks, until late 1849, and from 1850 Jonathan Brown of the Whaler's Arms on the opposite corner, still there in 1853. Kirkman's father John had come out as a convict in 1810, which is the house's real convict connection; the 2022 correction was to say that the publican was not the convict Thomas Kirkman Browne, as the entry had previously had it. On the 1804 barracks the Dictionary is plainer than the register: the claim rests on the gauge marks on the sandstone blocks, and the house was in fact built in 1844. It calls the early trade the crews of the whaling and sealing vessels that tied up at Millers Point, dates the minimal alterations to the conversion of two rooms into the present main bar in 1928, tells the tunnel and press-gang story as an enduring legend, and says the Hero is one of several hotels vying for the title of the city's oldest continuously trading pub. Its own sources are named: Gary Bell's Historic Pubs around Sydney of 2007, the City of Sydney's Millers Point and Walsh Bay heritage review of 2007, Joan Lawrence's Sydney from the Rocks of 1988, the State Heritage Register entry, and the Society of Australian Genealogists' transcription of publicans in the County of Cumberland from state records.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1843 | Claimed founding | The pub |
| c.1843 | Present building | Building fabric |
| 1845 | First record of a drinking house here | NSW State Heritage Register |
What to look for inside
- Legendary (unproven) smugglers' tunnel from the cellars to Darling Harbour
- Ghost tours of the cellars
- Main bar little altered since 1928
- Live jazz at weekends
Visiting
Hero of Waterloo Hotel is in Sydney, Australia, at 81-83 Lower Fort Street, Millers Point, Sydney NSW 2000. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero_of_Waterloo_Hotel
- dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/hero_of_waterloo_hotel
- heroofwaterloo.com.au/
- apps.environment.nsw.gov.au/dpcheritageapp/ViewHeritageItemDetails.aspx?ID=5045581
- dictionaryofsydney.org/building/hero_of_waterloo_hotel
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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