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Newmarket Hotel
1905, 1 Rockingham Road, Hamilton Hill, aka 2 Cockburn Road
Built by Gus Liebe.
The Newmarket Hotel in Hamilton Hill took its name from Newmarket, Suffolk, which was the centre of British horse-racing. The hotel was the headquarters for the Fremantle racing fraternity in the early 1900s.
The former hotel building has recently undergone a transformation to make it suitable for use as the Swan Ballet School.
Heritage Council: Newmarket Hotel is a two-storey building situated on a very busy intersection. The Hotel is built from coursed rough faced limestone. The walls also feature brick quoins and the roof is screened by a parapet wall. A verandah at the top storey level extends along three sides of the building. The original verandah had timber posts, balustrades and lattice work which were removed at some stage. The verandah has a separate corrugated iron roof and now has metal supporting posts. It represents one of many two-storey corner pubs built in Western Australia around the turn of the century.
Newmarket Hotel was the second hotel built in the area and it is the only one to continue operating under the original licence. From the early days until the 1960s there was a drinking trough for horses on the western side of the hotel, on the eastern side of Cockburn Road. In early times market gardeners from South Coogee and Spearwood and stockmen from Robbs Jetty and the Anchorage frequented the hotel. They would stop and water their horses and refresh themselves. Racehorse owners and trainers were among the many customers of the Newmarket. The hotel was a starting place for many bicycle races which were popular before the advent of the motor car.
In November 2008, it was announced that the hotel was to be restored to its former glory by Fremantle lawyer, Paul Maston.
Newmarket Hotel is a landmark as an imposing two-storey building located on a prominent corner site and featuring a distinctive parapeted form that is truncated at the corner.
Newmarket Hotel is associated with the horse racing industry – which thrived in the area from the early 1900s to the 1970s – as a consequence of being near South Beach Horse Exercise Area.
Newmarket Hotel is associated with the expansion of industry and agriculture south of Fremantle from the late nineteenth century, in particular the horse racing industry which thrived in the area from the 1900s to the 1970s.
Newmarket Hotel was run from 1945 to 1949 by George Russell Thompson, a professional boxer from 1922 to 1930 who was the Australian heavyweight boxing champion. Heritage Council.
References and Links
Heritage Council, as above.
First and third photos from Allen Graham's pubsofwa Facebook page; second from Google Maps.
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 20 September, 2014 and hosted at freotopia.org/hotels/newmarket.html (it was last updated on 28 November, 2023), and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.