Perth Sketchbook Book

City buildings are more than bricks, stone and mortar. They stamp the streetscapes with the hearts and minds of their builders; they show us a history, both public and private. Made small by the glass and steel of the modern age, Perth's older structures take us back to an era when urgency was measured in weeks and days, not hours and minutes. Perth was settled as one of the British Empire's most isolated outposts. It grew slowly from inauspicious beginnings - home to a few agriculturalists with a dream, and later to Britain's unwanted felons. Then suddenly, miraculously, there was gold. And gold meant fortune-seekers by their thousands, entrepreneurs with an eye to empires, and architects with visions sometimes splendid. Perth Sketchbook casts the buildings of early Perth against a backdrop of the city's history and the lives of some of its designers and prominent citizens.