Streets/cantonment.html
< Streets
[[Streets/index.html|
]]
Cantonment Street
[[img/cantonmentst.jpg|
]]From Market St to Parry St, Cantonment Street (like Adelaide St, to which it is parallel) is three blocks long. The central Wesley church is at the southern end, opposite Atwell Arcade, currently undergoing a transformation. That is only one of several major projects soon to be undertaken in the street, notably the current Woolstores shopping complex between Queen and Goldsborough Streets, and, in the next block, the old wool stores themselves. The Parry Street end of that section has already been rebuilt as apartments, and work has begun on the remaining large building.
On the other side of Parry Street, a multi-storey carpark is still bringing in revenue, but not for much longer, as the Adelaide/Point/Cantonment block is supposed to be the site for a Hilton DoubleTree hotel, and all the other buildings, including the Port Cinema, have been demolished. The new hotel will look over Princess May Park towards Clancys Fish Pub and the Princess May School, which is the last building in the street.
What is now Queen Victoria Street was called Cantonment Road, as it continued the Street presumably to a ... cantonment on or at the base of Cantonment Hill, but its name was changed in 1892 because of the obvious confusion. A cantonment is a military barracks, so there must have been one such there, tho it's not known exactly where. It seems likely that it used to be roughly where the Army Museum now is, but perhaps nearer to the corner of the present Burt and QV Streets.
Ewers:
CANTONMENT—This street appears on Surveyor-General Roe's very earliest map [1933], Cantonment Road being a continuation thereof and leading to the base of what was at first called Cantonment Hill (the hill on which the Signal Station was built in 1931). Owing to confusion, the name Cantonment Road was changed to Queen Victoria Street in 1892. Letters are extant written from the Cantonment, Fremantle, but apparently nobody at present [1948] alive knows of the exact situation of the Cantonment. As the streets were surveyed before 1833 right out to the present junction of the Canning Highway, it would seem to have been somewhere in that locality. Ewers: 220-221 (following Caldwell 1931).
NORTH SIDE
The extreme left of this photo is Market Street. Cantonment Street begins here and stretches away to the right (north-east). The first building is the Wesley Church, still extant. Next is the 1841 Wesley Chapel, the first religious building in Fremantle, with newer classrooms added on to its sides. Following that is the Wesleyan manse (the minister's house). Following that, but not in the photo, were the Fremantle Gas & Coke gasometers.
My poor photo of a photo in a frame hanging on a wall in Mike Finn's 1897 three-storey Princess Chambers (which is on the left of the photo). The 1889 Wesley Church is just left of centre, with the 1841 Chapel on the right, both on the north side of Cantonment Street. Date unknown, but before 1912.
Tbc, but I believe the front gasometer would have stood between where the Wesleyan manse once stood (to the left) and where the Fremantle Gas building still stands (to the right).
Extant building in the middle of the block between Market and Queen Streets.
NORTH SIDE
The Cantonment Street facade of Atwell Buildings in 1985, Fremantle City Library Local History Collection photo #E000115 by Skip Watkins, 1985. That's the Commercial Club to the left. The facade of Atwell Buildings remains, but has a new Mies glass box above it. The shops on the right are the block on the corner with Market Street, extant so far (2022).
The Commercial Club, 11 Cantonment St, first set up in 1912 for the Commercial Travellers Association in 1912, closed due to a lack of members in 1991. The corner of Atwell Buildings is on the extreme right.
Today (2022) it is a photographer's premises. What was Parry's Department Store, to the east (left) is now an apartment building.
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 8 October, 2015 and hosted at freotopia.org/streets/cantonment.html (it was last updated on 16 November, 2023). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.