The Story of Marble Bar: How a Lavish Victorian-Era Bar Was Dismantled and Rebuilt Beneath George Street

It’s a story so extravagant that it sounds made-up: an immigrant Cobb & Co-driver-turned-hotelier – who would create Australia’s largest gambling empire – building a hotel bar so opulent that it makes international headlines on its opening. When the hotel closes a century later, the bar is dismantled and put into storage, then rebuilt tile-for-tile one storey beneath Sydney’s busiest street.

Incredible as it sounds, that’s only part of the fascinating story behind Marble Bar, which has been a popular destination for drinks, bites and live music in the CBD for decades. Chances are, if you grew up in Sydney you’ve had a drink in this staggeringly well-adorned cocktail lounge without knowing how such a remarkable room came to be nestled beneath the Hilton on George Street.

“The original bar, named after its builder George Adams, was built in 1893, and cost the impressive sum of £32,000,” says Hilton Sydney marketing and communications manager Laura O’Reilly. “[The money] was raised through the Tattersall’s Sweeps, one of a series of horseracing sweepstakes held in New South Wales in the late 1800s.”

As a teenager, Adams migrated from Sandon, near London, to Australia with his family in 1855, and spent his early twenties working as a butcher, baker, sheep farmer and gold miner around Goulburn. While driving carriages for Cobb & Co as a young man, Adams purchased the Steam Packet Hotel in Kiama and relocated to the NSW South Coast with his wife Fanny.

A penchant for gambling saw Adams make frequent trips into Sydney to visit the Tattersall’s Hotel – a coach terminal, bar and hotel renowned for the betting action facilitated by its publican, William O’Brien.

In 1878, Adams took over the deed for the establishment for £40,000 – a sum he borrowed from friends. He renamed it Adams’ Tattersall’s Hotel, and soon implemented a public lottery draw (Adams was the originator of the Tattslotto draw) with a £900 jackpot. The hotel and lottery both thrived, but by the late 1880s, newer hotels around Sydney had begun to attract the attention of overseas visitors.

Keen to create something worthy of international attention, Adams enlisted designer Varney Parkes – son of former NSW Premier and “father of federation” Sir Henry Parkes – to build him “the finest ale room in the colonies”.

Reviews were instantly glowing. When its doors opened on Christmas Eve 1892, the press called the George Adams Bar, with its stunning mosaics, walnut-carved fixtures, hand-painted and stained-glass windows, and swathes of marble sourced from Italy, the Pyrenees, Belgium and Australia, “an hotel superior in its appointments to any in the city”.

Showcased alongside the superlative appointments and intricate fixtures were 14 paintings by artist Julian Ashton, commissioned for a record-breaking sum for the men-only space and variously embodying the seasons, the senses, weather patterns and times of day through the popular Edwardian vehicle of female nudes.

“Ashton was an influential English-born artist who migrated to Australia in 1878 and set up the Julian Ashton Art School in The Rocks in 1890,” O’Reilly says of the painter. Among the school’s many notable alumni are John Olsen, Brett Whiteley and Thea Proctor. “The original paintings created for the bar in 1893 are still in place, though not all in their original positions.”

Adams died in 1904, and his extravagant, eponymous bar continued to operate until February 18, 1969, when the hotel was torn down to make way for the incumbent Hilton Hotel.

“When Adams Hotel was demolished every section of the old bar was numbered, X-rayed, dismantled, documented, crated, and stored until it was time to bring them all back to life,” reported the Australian Women’s Weekly on the bar’s subterranean reopening in 1973.

While justification for the bar’s move below ground seems lost to time (“The decision around this is unknown,” says O’Reilly), restorations have carefully ensured most of the features today appear the way they did in 1893.

The reconstructed bar looks largely identical to how it did when Adams would sip whisky in it, with a few exceptions: natural light no longer floods in through the stained and painted glass ceiling panels, and the position of a number of Ashton’s paintings is different. All 35 varieties of colourful marble – over 100 tonnes in total – were painstakingly reconnected, adorned with dual mahogany bars, four (decommissioned) fireplaces, and carved cedar joinery featuring yet more female nudes.

Designed to evoke the bar’s heritage, today’s cocktail list embraces and revives what O’Reilly says are “unforgettable classic cocktails that have stood the test of time, much like Marble Bar”. She says that while George Adams’ bar welcomed businessmen (“and only businessmen, from a period where women could only work behind the bar”), today Marble Bar is “celebrated by both women and men”.

Guests attracted by the promise of a Side Car, Last Word or Brandy Alexander in these historic surrounds have included Liza Minnelli, Wyclef Jean, Adam Lambert and Slash, while Cold Chisel chose the bar to shoot the cover of their 1979 album Breakfast at Sweethearts.

Today, Marble Bar’s reputation for live music, DJs and world-class cocktails mightn’t be what George Adams envisaged when he set out to create the finest bar in the world, and he might be disappointed to no longer see his name hanging above the door, but for a man who built an empire from nothing, few successes would mean as much as his magnum opus still welcoming visitors after 130 years.

marblebarsydney.com.au