Brisbane ABC – Albion – Mitchell News

We decided it would be good idea to go and visit a random suburb in Brisbane each week. We would start with a suburb starting with the letter A in the first week, the letter B in the second week etc.
I downloaded a list of all of the suburbs and then created an excel formula to randomly pick a suburb. For A, it picked Albion. This was relatively close to where we were living in New Farm.

So about Albion – Albion is an inner north-eastern suburb of the City of Brisbane, the state capital of Queensland, Australia. In the 2016 census, Albion had a population of 2,296 people. A variety of housing styles, from former workers’ cottages through to modern brick homes and unit blocks, can be found in Albion.

The name Albion comes from the Albion Hotel built by Thomas Hayseldon (also written as Hazeldon), which was so called because the white wall of John Petrie’s quarry reminded Hayseldon of the England’s white cliffs (Albion being an old name for England, from the Latin albus meaning white). The low lying parts of Albion came into the limelight when a swampy area near the Breakfast Creek was designated as the racecourse. In 1885, it became the headquarters of the Smithfield Pony Club and later in 1895 of the Albion Park Racecourse. Many Chinese migrants settled here and the Temple of the Holy Triad was built on the Higgs Street for the local community in 1885-86.

We enjoyed walking the backstreets and seeing the contrast in the houses. Some old and some very new. The older homes certainly had more character. The area does also have a few hills that we walked up and enjoyed good views back to the City of Brisbane. Being during Covid isolation, we were lucky to find a coffee shop to get a take away coffee that we enjoyed in one of the local parks.

All in all, we spent a few enjoyable hours getting to see somewhere we had not been before. In one of the parks, they had a constructed examples of a number of bee hives encouraging people to do the same in their gardens.