Zoning Laws: Asquith

For today we're just having a quick one. Scraping the northern bounds of metro Sydney (before you hit the Hawkesbury region, anyway), this is

Asquith

Hop on a northbound train at Central, sit on it for an hour or so, and you'll find yourself in Asquith.

Like many suburbs, Asquith is sliced in two by the train tracks. The eastern side is the larger of the two, and appears to be primarily residential,

while the western side contains the Pacific Highway and the suburb's main commercial strip.

I was invited to a friend's get together at her place on the western side of the suburb, and I was already running a little late, so this post will be just a brief foray into western Asquith.

Like all good Pacific Highway suburbs, I did the customary "wait 46 years until the lights change",

before giving up and jaywalking across when a gap in traffic appeared (presumably caused by someone in an upstream suburb who managed to get a green crossing light).

Asquith's shopping strip is a fairly standard affair, with local takeaways and a mishmash of local businesses.

Of interest to me was this bakery with streamers for a door. I thought that was more of a butcher thing?

I turned off the highway, passed the finest local cuisine,

an adorable little post office,

and an even cuter day care centre operating out of Snoopy's House.

This led me to my first taste of residential Asquith.

All I can say is: what a funny place.

On one side of this dinky suburban street are older, free standing houses, mainly on fairly large plots of land.

On the other side? Apartments as far as the eye can see.

It's all rather remarkable.

Continuing onto other streets, the story carries on, with a stark contrast between old Asquith and new-Asquith.

There isn't much else to say, is there?

At least you can enjoy a little colour,

and some crane-spotting too.

At this stage, I headed into one of the new apartments for the get together.

Asquith: Normally when you think of density in Sydney's north, you think of the dense gums of Ku Ring Gai National Park. Asquith provides an alternate response.

On a side note, most "real-estatey" posts I do (places like Zetland, Schofields) get a whole heap of weird and unintelligible spam comments. With the amount of development in Asquith, I can only assume this trend will continue for this post.