Walk Off O'Connell Street: North Adelaide
And lose some of those North Adelaide café calories with Keith Conlon.

Which old pub is now the national headquarters of a church?
Where did two Nobel Prize winners live in North Adelaide?
They are both close to the café cluster on O'Connell St, North Adelaide. There are nearly 40 places to get something to eat along the main thoroughfare, but, in the streets that run off it, there's a feast of heritage.

At the city end, head past the 1950's Hotel Adelaide to Palmers Place, and you pass the dress circle of Adelaide living last century. Mansions for men of capital have now mostly been taken over by medical specialists.

Kingsmead stands refurbished as a grand private residence, however. It set the trend in 1865, built approximately for café set ramblers by a coffee tea and sugars merchant. Through a later owner, it's linked to a missing person mystery.

Mining and pastoral migrate Edward Bagot lived in it till his death in 1886. He had caught the horse tram home from the city, but then he disappeared. His body was found a week later in a quarry several kilometers away. It was suggested he may have fallen from the train, and wandered, dazed, till he fell into the quarry. Or did he meet foul play?

Further along Palmers Place is a very ecclesiastical corner. The Romanesque bulk of Christchurch is a sign that by the 1850's, this part of North Adelaide was well populated. It was the cathedral church for the colony's first Anglican bishop, Augustus Short. He may have lost a court battle to put his new cathedral in Victoria Square, but he scored a magnificent location for his new house when he bought the town acre next door to Christchurch.

The tall gables of the two-storey Bishops Court did not see completion of the building for several years, however. The foundation stone was laid in 1851, but then the Victorian gold rush demanded South Australia of labourers. Bishop's Court was not completed until 1857.

The pub that became a church headquarters? It is the gateway to our second walk of O'Connell Street in this week's episode of Postcards.

An ornately decorated two storey freestone corner building, the Huntsmen Hotel served patrons on the Archer Street entrance till about 1960. It was purchased by the Lutheran Church to become its national office.

It is typical of a grand building boom of the 1870's and 1880's, and along Archer Street are several groups of terrace houses - probably the best gathering of them in a state. Dolphin Terrace and Bohm Terrace, for instance, were erected in the 1880's, just before an economic collapse. The latter was one of the first of the substantial renovations and restorations through North Adelaide, heralding a new social status for the area which has built since the 1960's.

Over the road from Bohm Terrace is the 1864 Police Station. It is much simpler in decoration and design. These days its home to those who want to play cops on TV; it's a casting agency office.

The corner of Tynte and O'Connell Streets in the epicentre of the North Adelaide café scene. It's also where the commercial street meets the old High Street.

Heading east towards the hills, you pass an early Victorian two storey shop that's turned full circle. It originally had living quarters over the street premises, and now, after serving for most of this century as a fire brigade station, its comfortable accommodation for visitors. A more unusual Bed and Breakfast will be hard to find!.

The North Adelaide Primary School next door is all limestone grand and gothic. As a model school during South Australia's great push for public education in the 1870's, it was needed urgently that the authorities borrowed the design of Buninyong School in Victoria.

A quaint row of terraced two-storey houses later, a perennial favourite stands on a corner. There's been a bakery there since the 1850's, and Perryman's is still dispensing its unique bite size pasties, designed to be affordable during the Depression.

For the answer to the Nobel Prize winners question, you'll need to go to the Tynte and Le Fevre Terrace corner. An Adelaide jeweller built the substantial semi-detached two storey Victorian houses as an investment. In the one closest to the south east corner, he soon had as tenant Professor William Bragg. His son, William, was born there. They did some of their pioneering X-ray crystallography work at the University of Adelaide before returning to England. There they both received the Nobel Prize for Physics.

On the western side of O'Connell Street, Tynte Street is also rich with heritage goodies to finish off a café feed - and walk some of it off.

The Oxford Hotel on the corner is a symbol of two booms, about a century apart. It, too, is high Victorian, with much classical decoration, and it was transformed from a seedy local to herald the 1990's boutique hotel and café boom. Immediately behind it on Tynte Street, a row of shops were once a modest workers' cottages, dating back about 150 years.

The new Jerusalem! That's the way many devout non-Anglican Christians saw the colony of South Australia. They were free to worship as they wished, and get on in society. No modest chapel for the North Adelaide Baptists then Š they built a very unusual and impressive church. Likened to a giant sarcophagus - a stone coffin - it's in a very embellished Venetian style.

The strong lines of the Post Office and Institute Building are important to the High Street feel. It is a handsome monument to a boom that was not all wealth. It was also a cultural up-welling.

Over the road, the old Commercial Inn had its own redevelopment in the 1880's. It's a fine two storey verandah pub, most recently becoming an Irish pub, and renamed the Daniel O'Connell.

Our last wander off O'Connell Street named for said Irish patriot, takes us to the corner of Ward Street and Jeffcolt Street. There stands one of the finest provincial educational buildings anywhere in Australia.

Whinham College was to be a place of triumph and tragedy for its founder, John Winham. His North Adelaide Grammar School was regarded very highly last century and so this major institution was built with distinctive polychrome brick decoration and clocktower. Sadly, within two years of his taking over as Principal, John's son, Robert Winham, fell from his horse and was killed.

Circling back to the café scene, Wellington Square reminds its visitors that this was all part of Colonial Lights plan for the city of Adelaide. It was named, like the old hotel on its edge, for the Duke of Wellington, who had been instrumental in seeing the necessary legislation for development of the colony through the House of Lords.

There is still a lot of work to be done to make it all accessible through plaques and signage, but there is a smorgasbord of heritage just off the café strip in historic North Adelaide.