Frank Fox b. 1913

  • Designer
Frank Fox was an architect (perhaps not registered?), industrial designer and interior designer who initially was successful as the designer of late 1940s and early 1950s shops and restaurants, but became best known as the entrepreneur who created Old Sydney Town, a tourist attraction which opened in 1975 and recreated the buildings and cultural life of the waterfront convict settlement of Sydney's The Rocks district.

Frank Fox was born in Bundaberg, Queensland and was apprenticed to design firms in Melbourne and Sydney. He also studied through the International Correspondence School (ICS), then moved to London in 1939 for further study. After the Second World War, in 1946, he set up his own 'commercial and industrial design’ practice in Sydney, Frank Fox and Associates (also known as Frank R. Fox), specialising in store design and remodelling hospitality venues. Some of his early projects included Oxford Square, Central Square, the Crest Hotel and the Granville RSL Club. He also completed redesigns of the Searles flower shop at 104 King Street and Penguin bookshop at Hosking Place (then existing between Pitt and Castlereagh Streets), Sydney. He also worked in Queensland, Victoria. In the late 1960s, he began to develop Old Sydney Town, a tourist attraction on rural land near Gosford, which recreated Sydney Cove during its early years of settlement as a British colony. The Town opened in 1975 and was sold to the NSW Government and Bank of New South Wales before Fox retired in 1976.

Sources
—'Two Shops with A Narrow Frontage: Searle’s Flower Shop, Penguin Book Shop’, in Decoration and Glass,November-December 1948, pp. 12–13.
—'Modern Basement Cafe’, Decoration and Glass, Mau-June 1948, pp. 20-21.
—'The architect founder of Old Sydney Town’, in The Sydney Morning Herald (Obituary), 23 May 1981.

Writers:

Michael Bogle
Davina Jackson
Date written:
2012
Last updated:
2024