by Dr Noris Ioannou

Have you noticed this strange small building in Rundle Park / Kadlitpina (Park 13) near the corner of Botanic Road and Dequetteville Terrace?

It’s on a site that was restored to your Park Lands in the 1980s; and is a rare surviving example of patterned brickwork that was commonly used in the late 1800s; notably so given the relatively rare octagonal shape of the building.

This building is all that remains of what was once known as the Kent Town waterworks yard.

This “valve house” was built in 1857. It was part of a depot that provided manufacturing, maintenance and operations activities to run Adelaide’s water supply.

The “valve house” was dismantled in the early 1980s, when Dequetteville Terrace and Hackney Road were being widened.

It was taken apart, stone by stone, brick by brick. In 1984 it was reconstructed about 20 metres further back from the corner of Dequetteville Terrace and Botanic Road, where it still stands.

It’s one of several pieces of 19th century Adelaide infrastructure that were built with locally-produced bricks and pipes.

Adelaide was the first fully septic-drained city in Australia.

Primitive sanitary conditions along the densely populated riverside of the Adelaide settlement had led to calls as early as the 1840s for civic authorities to initiate a proper system of sewerage.

It was not until 1878 that legislation provided for the introduction of a sewerage system for the city of Adelaide and the suburbs. Salt-glazed pipes used to install the sewerage drainage system were produced in great numbers by local manufacturers in Brompton and Hindmarsh, especially from the 1860s and ‘70s onwards and, indeed, into the 1940s.

However, the use of locally made drainpipes initially met with colonial prejudice. Oswald Brown, the government hydraulic engineer and superintendent of the proposed drainage scheme, formed a view that locally made stoneware pipes were not equal in quality to imported English pipes, and thus, opposed their use. 

A potter, George Marks, who had trained and worked at Doulton Pottery in England, and who was the proprietor of the successful Ballarat Pottery, had moved to Adelaide to set up a semi-industrialised manufactory of high-quality pipes. However, he still had to prove the quality of his articles to the government engineer. There is an account, probably apocryphal, of how Marks did this.

According to the story, one night Marks climbed over the wall of the Kent Town waterworks depot and made off with one of the imported English pipes.

It was later sent back among a batch of pipes made at Marks’ new pottery works at Brompton. On testing, officials could not distinguish between the locally made pipes and the imported pipe. Marks eventually secured several, large government contracts.

There are other surviving buildings (both in your Park Lands and nearby suburbs) that are constructed with the clay products of the numerous brickworks and potteries that flourished from the 1869s onwards. Many of them remain in the near-city suburbs Hindmarsh, Bowden, Brompton, and further west.

Prosperous years saw the adoption from England of a new building fashion. This was polychrome (multi-coloured) brickwork – that is, the use of bricks of different colours to produce patterns on the face of buildings. The technique became popular, especially in Melbourne and Sydney. 

You can still see some of these buildings in Adelaide, including one notable example in Park 11 of your Park Lands.

The Zoological Gardens’ original serpentine walls and pillars at the entrance on Frome Road [in Park 11] is no longer used as a Zoo entrance. But the old entrance is still there, preserving a wonderful example of polychrome brickwork, with patterns created through the use of a red-brick diaper pattern set in cream-brick panels. 

Local brickworks and potteries also moulded various ornamental pieces, such as columns, capitals, and other shaped moulded bricks.

Next time you’re on North Terrace, look behind and above the whalebone exhibits at the front of the SA Museum, and marvel at the Romanesque façade of red brickwork, with acanthus leaf Corinthian mouldings and column. 

Dr Noris Ioannou is a cultural historian whose writing has focused on material folk culture and the arts and crafts, particularly the way tradition, place, and innovation have shaped Australia’s identity and heritage.

His eight books include Ceramics in South Australia 1836-1986: from folk to studio pottery (Wakefield Press 1986) and The Barossa Folk: Germanic Furniture and Craft Traditions in Australia, as well as the cultural travel book, Barossa Journeys: Into A Valley of Tradition (Wakefield Press 1986), now in its third edition. His latest cultural history, Vernacular Visions - a Folklife History of Australia: art, diversity, story-telling, was published by Wakefield Press in 2021.