Liverpool, New South Wales

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Liverpool is a suburb in the City of Liverpool in south western Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. It is located 32 km (20 miles) from the Sydney central business district. However, it is part of the Greater Sydney metropolitan area.

[edit] History

It is one of the oldest urban settlements in Australia, founded in 1810 as an agricultural centre by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. He named it after Robert Banks Jenkinson, Earl of Liverpool, who was then the Secretary of State for the Colonies.

Liverpool is at the head of navigation of the Georges River and combined with the Great Southern Railway from Sydney to Melbourne reaching Liverpool in the late 1850s, Liverpool became a major agricultural and transportation centre as the land in the district was very productive.

Until the 1950s, Liverpool was still a satellite town with an agricultural economy based on poultry farming and market gardening. However the tidal surge of urban sprawl which engulfed the rich flatlands west of Sydney known as the Cumberland Plain soon reached Liverpool, and it became an outer suburb of metropolitan Sydney with a strong working-class presence and manufacturing facilities. The Liverpool area also became renowned for its vast Housing Commission estates housing thousands of low-income families after the slum clearance and urban renewal programs in inner-city Sydney in the 1960s.

Liverpool to the North, 1945-55.	Liverpool to the south-west, 1945-55.	Liverpool to the South, 1945-55.

[edit] Modern Liverpool

Liverpool is noted for its high percentage of people from non-English speaking backgrounds. In the city itself, the most numerous and visible community are Serbs, which also live in most of the surrounding suburbs such as Mount Pritchard and Warwick Farm. There are also large communities of Fijian Indians, Vietnamese, Italians, Lebanese and Pacific Islanders spread all over the Liverpool council area. The city is full of ethnic shops, cafes and restaurants and is generally equated with the Serbian and Fijian Indian communities.

Liverpool is well served by transport facilities such as the Hume Highway, the M5 motorway, a frequent electric railway service to Sydney, Campbelltown and Parramatta and the Hoxton Park Airport. It is home to the largest municipal library in Australia^{[citation needed]}, a large teaching hospital, two technical colleges and many shopping centres and office buildings. Industries include a large cable factory, a telephone manufacturer, pharmaceutical laboratories and cold storage plants.

The private hospital operator Healthscope owns the Sydney Southwest Private Hospital in Liverpool.

There are several local schools in the Liverpool district, namely: Liverpool Boys High, Liverpool Girl's High, All Saints, Good Samaritan Catholic College, Liverpool Public School and Moorebank High School.

Liverpool is also host to Sonic stir-fry, a community radio program broadcast every Friday night at 10pm.

Liverpool is currently undergoing a rapid transformation into major CBD in its own right. The northern end of the city is a construction zone as multi unit residential buildings are in the process of being built.

A large commercial development is proposed in the Southern end of the city at Scott Street that will help develop the under used southern end of the Liverpool CBD by balancing out the Westfields at the Northern end. Two towers have also been approved for development on the intersection of Norfolk and Castlereagh streets. The city centre is shaped similar to that of a Hoddle Grid layout.

Local sports clubs include Moorebank Sports Club, and local team identities such as The Cattledogs Indoor Cricket team