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Princes Centre

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Princes Centre

Hindley Street, Adelaide CBD.
Yet another example of awful 1960's cladding to try to make a building look modern. Hopefully some day we will see the cladding removed and a beautiful old stone facade will shine though...

Newmarket Hotel

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Newmarket Hotel

The Newmarket Hotel oepned in 1847 at the corner of North and West terraces where the city of Adelaide began soon after the European settlement of South Australia.

On 11 January 11, 1837, first surveyor general colonel William Light started his famous survey to lay out the city of Adelaide at the future hotel's site. It was known as Town Acre 1, the first 750 one-acre lots that would comprise the Adelaice city square mile. With the Botanic Hotel at the other end of North Terrace, the future Newmarket would form a notable bookend of the four city terraces.

After a livestock market and slaughterhouse was set up nearby of the northern side of North Terrace, the New Market Inn quickly began trading, licensed in 1847 by W.H. Dumbleton. The South Australian beer measure, the “butcher”, was said to have come from the hotel's link to the market that was removed from its North Terrace site in the 1920s.

The hotel gained a new grand building in 1883, with its name contracted to the Newmarket. Designed by Daniel Garlick and built by W. Barker, it replaced the earlier brick and stone structure and opened “to cater for the tastes of the better classes”. The new Newmarket hotel was described as the “nearest approach to a first-class American hotel of any . . . seen in Australia”. The South Australian Register newspaper commented: “The old building was a relic of the past primitive days but the new one means luxury and progress . . . the building has three floors, besides cellarage with 48 rooms in all . . . Altogether the hotel is a fine example of the wide gap existing between Adelaide of 1850 and Adelaide of 1883”.

The new 1880s hotel was built for Frances Badman, a former licensee of the Earl of Zetland Hotel who owned the Newmarket from 1876 to 1899. One of the more notorious licensees was Albert Augustine (Bert) Edwards, “king of the West End”, who owned the Newmarket from 1924-31. Reputedly an illegitimate child of South Australian premier Charles Cameron Kingston, the extraordinary and unconventional Edwards was a West Adelaide Football club official, a Labor state politician and held Grey Ward on Adelaide city council. He was a major supporter of Adelaide’s poor and prisoners and had strong views on anti-conscription.

In 1915, Edwards bought his first hotel, the Duke of Brunswick in Gilbert Street, Adelaide city, and later operated several city and country hotels as well as the Newmarket. In 1930, he was arrested for sodomy, and gaoled for two and a half years at Yatala Labour Prison. Edwards could not return to the Newmarket after being released as a foreclosure order had been served during his imprisonment. This order enabled Arthur Green to buy the hotel in 1931.

In the late 20th Century, the Newmarket became the venue for the nightclubs Bojangles and Joplins. These were followed in 1995 by Heaven, Adelaide’s first superclub. Heaven closed in the early 2000s and reopened under new owners and managers as HQ, the premier nightclub in Adelaide. The HQ Complex closed its doos, along with the hotel in 2017.

In 2013, “carpark king” Damien Lester had unveiled ambitious plans for a $150 million office and hotel project. Next came 2015 plans for $32 million hotel fronting West Terrace. Both projects never started.

In 2018, the state-heritage-listed Newmarket Hotel stirred support with reports that it might be partly demolished, leaving only the facade, as the site for a new women’s and children’s hospital opposite the Royal Adelaide Hospital. Among those calling for the hotel to be saved was Lumen Studio director architect Julian Rutt: “While I applaud the proposal for a new WCH hospital in the vicinity of the new medical precinct, any proposal that could suggest demolition of the Newmarket [would be] so ill considered, it goes beyond short-sighted or visionless, and into urban vandalism.”

The hotel building was saved but remained vacant into the 2020s.

Hendrix on Hindley

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Hendrix on Hindley

Great mural on Hindley Street, Adelaide CBD

Fukuyama Castle

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Fukuyama Castle

The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

Trump’s pick for US attorney general Todd Blanche in jeopardy as vote postponed

Republican John Cornyn says he will not back nomination without written confirmation $1.8bn slush fund is dead

Todd Blanche’s hopes of becoming US attorney general seemed to be in jeopardy on Wednesday after the Department of Justice did not provide written assurances to a key Republican senator that a $1.8bn slush fund was dead.

The US Senate judiciary committee postponed a vote scheduled for Thursday on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination.

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Ukraine war briefing: F-16 crashes while chasing Russian air targets

Pilot found safe and taken for medical treatment after ‘malfunction’; Russian drone company chief shot. What we know on day 1,618

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MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

Golden flower cutting the cost of urea fertiliser for farmers

Golden flower cutting the cost of urea fertiliser for farmers. A colourful legume crop is emerging as a solution to the rising cost of fertiliser, significantly reducing the need for urea.

Fertiliser costs have surged in the wake of the conflict in the Middle East, leaving farmers searching for ways to cut input costs. Urea, a nitrogen fertiliser widely used across various agricultural sectors, has become increasingly expensive and difficult to source, prompting some growers to turn to natural nitrogen alternatives.

Our lives are full of countless rotten little thieves...

I Hate Adobe

"It's not a path that works for everyone," Aurahack told me. "I'm sympathetic to artists in other professional capacities who are locked into that ecosystem for business reasons and I'm very fortunate to exist in the freelance capacity that I do, but the end result still feels like my best expression of self. If anything, it forced me to get a little creative with how I approach my own versatility and that mentality has done me nothing but good."

Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project

Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes instead of years. It's now being used to accelerate drug discovery, develop vaccines and understand the structural changes in proteins associated with neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

DeepMind started developing AlphaFold in 2018. In 2020, it was recognized as a solution to humanity's 50-year-old "protein folding problem," which sought to answer how amino acids automatically fold into complex 3D shapes. Those shapes determine the biological role of a protein. Scientists had identified the structures of roughly 170,000 proteins over the past 50 years, using tools and techniques like X-ray and nuclear magnetic resonance. The AlphaFold team took information from those previous work and then fed it to their AI to train AlphaFold.

In 2021, Nature published the papers with AlphaFold's methodology and the structure predictions of the entire human proteome, or the complete set of proteins expressed by our species. DeepMind then launched the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database, giving researchers free access to over 200 million protein structure predictions. In 2024, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, who was a staff research scientist when the project began and who eventually became a VP and engineering fellow, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.