Our Venue
Public House Petersham has long been a home to our community, and everyone is welcome to join us to share stories, have a bite or sip, bring the family or settle in to watch some sport.
We’re built for every kind of gathering. Public House Petersham is a place for friends to share a beer after the game, for families to gather for long Sunday lunches, and for locals to feel so welcome that they treat our backyard like their own.
At Public House Petersham, there’s something for everybody, whether it’s watching the footy on our screens in the sports room or celebrating upstairs with views over Petersham.
Our Story So Far
Public House Petersham has a long and proud history.
We have been serving the inner west of Sydney for nearly 170 years. We’ve operated under various names, but the aim has never changed: to serve our community with the welcoming hospitality that began on a dusty Stanmore Road back in 1858.
The original hotel was built in 1858, a small, square two-storey wooden structure with a cookhouse and stables at the rear. It was built on “a mere bush track” called Stanmore Road and started its life with the name Stanmore Hotel.
In a Marrickville Heritage Society heritage study, ‘The Newington Inn 1858-1989’, Judith Matheson tells us the hotel first began trading in 1858, even before Marrickville was incorporated as a municipality.
Its first publican was Mary Marshall, a “dairywoman” and widow with three sons, who was granted a publican’s licence in 1858. Later that year, Mary married William Denning, who served as the licensee from 1861-1867.A book published in 1936 – ‘A History of the Municipality of Marrickville’ (by Chrys Meader/Richard Cashman/Anne Carolyn) – notes the hotel’s early days. “The old horse trough in front was a reminder of other days, and the rear part of the house with its walls and rafters and transformed coach house is a reminder of the days when horse-drawn vehicles rumbled and red coated officers rode along Stanmore Road.”
For a time, the hotel was known as the Do Drop Inn, briefly the Petersham Hotel and for many years the Newington Hotel.
In the late 1980s the hotel underwent extensive renovations and re-opened in 1989. It was, for a time, as Judith Matheson tells us, a “down-at-heel local watering hole [and] probably lucky to have escaped demolition. Now the hotel has been gentrified, like so many hotels in inner Sydney.”
Twenty-five years later, it was renovated again and relaunched in 2015 as Public House Petersham.
Petersham and Us
Our venue shares with Petersham a long and storied history in Sydney’s inner west.
Inns and pubs were often among the first buildings to appear in newly established Australian settlements and towns, and they became a core part of the community.
A 2023 Inner West Heritage Study of historic pubs noted the crucial role public houses played in the establishment of settlement towns in the late nineteenth century.
“Initially, inns and pubs followed British and Irish traditions that had been brought to Australia with colonisation,” it noted. “They provided accommodation to travellers in a time where movement, even over comparatively short distances, was difficult, they served food and drinks, and they provided a space for people to meet and mingle.”
After the arrival of the railway in 1855 and further subdivision and residential growth in the Inner West, more hotels were built in Petersham, Stanmore and Marrickville. “In the 1870s and 1880s larger, more elaborate pubs began to be built as the population of the Inner West boomed with the growth of industry,” the study noted.
What To Expect at Public House Petersham
A big Inner West welcome, for starters.
We offer some of the best food, music and local beer that the inner west has to offer, from Italian and Mediterranean-style share plates to wood-fired pizza fresh from the oven or simply a delicious glass of wine or spritz in the beer garden.
We are very family-focused and have a large kids’ play area.
Our Community
Bordered by Leichhardt to the north, Stanmore to the east, Marrickville to the south and Lewisham to the west, we are proudly right in the heart of Sydney’s inner west.
We encourage local community groups and clubs to use the venue as a place to meet and host activities.
