Heritage advocates said plans to rebuild the historic villa would have amounted to ‘fake heritage’.
The historic 19th-century villa Willow Grove, controversially pulled down to make way for the Powerhouse Parramatta and a flashpoint for public protests, will never rise again.
“The Parramatta community does not support replica heritage buildings being the precedent for developments that are too lazy to incorporate our-fast disappearing heritage,” the group’s president Suzette Meade said. Graham said Willow Grove’s significance as a key site of female and First Nations history, and in nursing and midwifery would be honoured differently with a book about the site’s broad history and interpretative text panels in the Powerhouse undercroft, an open basement space built to collect floodwaters.The building’s slate roofing, windows, the front door, timber framing and stairs, the front fence and more than 90 per cent of the original bricks of Willow Grove were in secure storage.
“We will be pushing this government to make sure that the 1890s-built Willow Grove and its history from home to hospital and the story of the passionate community battle to save it has an enduring commemoration,” she said. “We don’t believe you can rebuild it in any true sense because any new building would have to meet new building code requirements,” Trust’s conservation director David Burdon said. “We’d essentially have a new building with some old pieces stuck on it, that’s the reality of it.”
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