Team America: Marsden Park

We're delving deeper into the city's Northwest, with a post I'm going to have a little bit of fun with.

Marsden Park

So Marsden Park is a big, wide suburb. It's a stone's throw from Schofields and Colebee, which I've just covered, and I'll immediately call out that I'm not going to detail the whole place.

The suburb has three main areas to be aware of, I'll mainly be delving into one of them.

You may remember back in Campbelltown that I took a stroll down Cholesterol Corner, Sydney's own Sunset Boulevard, featuring all of the world's finest fattening fried fast food from Freedomville on one strip of road (if not, go check it out, I'll be here waiting).

Cholesterol Corner is Southwest Sydney's tribute to our friends across The Pacific, but Northwest has given it a red hot go as well.

As soon as you cross into the suburb from its southeast border, you hit Sydney Business Park.

Now, when you hear business park, you normally think about some boring office buildings in the middle of nowhere, but not here.

Here, you get big-ole American style big-box retailers. This is the kind of place where you drive from one shop to the other.

OK, Bunnings and Aldi, nothing too American here.

An Ikea, yes they need the space.

A Lindt factory outlet,

where you can buy your candy by the pound-full.

Of course, however, the highlight of the show is Costco, the members only hypermarket where the answer to "how much of that do you need?" is always "one pallet's worth, please".

I was even lucky enough to come across a real American pickup truck in the carpark (sorry, parking lot).

Those things aren't known for being great on gas. Luckily, Costco has a servo as well.

As if purely to prove the point, across the road from the shops is a drive-thru Starbucks. I didn't even know we had those in this country.

Now with all that, you really might think you are in America. Reality comes crashing back down though, when you notice that the footpath (sidewalk) has cycling lanes,

and that you can even catch a bus to the shops like some sort of communist.

I was feeling particularly free, so naturally my lunch today was the local cuisine.

You may have spotted this already in one of the pickup truck photos above, but these shops actually neighbour a large mosque.

This is Masjid Bait-Ul Huda (according to the sign anyway) and is run by the Ahmadiyya Muslim community, which Wikipedia tells me is a type of Islam originating out of India in the 19th century. If any Ahmadis are reading this, I like your building.

At the start of this post, I mentioned that this suburb has three main areas. I've now gone over one, and am not going to spend too much time on the others.

The suburb is divided by the busy Richmond Road (the road with the Starbucks drive-thru). Naturally, this is the highway of sorts which leads to Richmond, and it's actually quite a pretty road, with the blue mountains visible clearly in the distance (apologies for the rubbish photo, safety first!)

There are two main places you can hit when you turn off Richmond Road in Marsden Park.

The first is a big new housing development (currently a work in progress) which looks 99% the same as the ones we've just seen in the past two suburbs, so I'll leave it at this Google Maps photo showing us all the lovely black roofed houses spaced 2cm apart. No trees required.

The other side is straight up Sydney-by-technicality rural roads, where the the houses are wide, the space is abundant and the trees are plenty.

And with that, I drove off to the next suburb.

Marsden Park: We're going to build a suburb, and we're going to make Melbourne pay for it.

Thanks for reading this one, I had a lot of fun writing it. If you enjoyed it, please feel free to share it with your friends.