Every street has a story. But not every street was named after a siren.
If you have ever walked from Katoomba station down to the Three Sisters, you have walked the length of Lurline Street. It is one and a half kilometres of footpath, shopfront, cottage garden, and eucalyptus canopy that connects a busy mountain town to one of Australia's most dramatic cliff edges. Around 1.4 million visitors a year make some version of that walk. Most of them have no idea they are treading on 140 years of remarkable history.
This is the story of the street itself. How it got its name. How it was carved from a farmer's paddock. How its trees were planted, removed, and are now being planted again. And why it matters.
A Siren on the Rhine
The name Lurline sounds distinctly Australian. It has the shape of an old-fashioned girl's name, the kind you might find on a headstone in a country cemetery or stamped on the bow of a harbour ferry. And you would be right on both counts. There was a Matson Line ocean liner called the SS Lurline, and there were plenty of Australian women given the name in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
But the word traces back to something much older and stranger.
Lurline is an English variation of Lorelei, the legendary figure from Germanic folklore. The Lorelei was a beautiful maiden, or perhaps a water spirit, who sat on a steep rock overlooking the Rhine River in Germany. She sang so beautifully that boatmen, entranced by her voice, forgot to steer and were dashed against the rocks. The name itself comes from the Old German "lureln" (murmuring) and the Celtic "ley" (rock). Murmuring rock.
Here is where the connection to Katoomba becomes almost uncanny. The word Katoomba, in the language of the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples whose Country this is, is understood to mean "shining falling water." The street named Lurline, murmuring rock, leads directly to Echo Point, where water, stone, and sound meet in the vast amphitheatre of the Jamison Valley.
Frederick Clissold and the 78 Lots
In 1881, a wool merchant and land speculator named Frederick Clissold bought 50 acres of land from James Henry Neale. Neale held Portion 53, a block of country running south from the railway line, and Clissold paid him seven pounds an acre for it. Then Clissold did what land speculators do. He drew lines on a map.
He created three streets running north to south: Lurline, Katoomba, and Parke. He divided the land into 78 lots and put them on the market. Modern Katoomba, as a town with a grid and addresses and property boundaries, was born in that act of subdivision.
Clissold was an Englishman living in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield. He was a prolific subdivider who also created estates at Leura (giving that town its name for the first time) and in the Canterbury area. He served on Ashfield Council and helped found the Canterbury Park Race Club. He chose the street names from his personal connections. Katoomba was the name already attached to the locality. Parke likely honoured a business associate. And Lurline? According to the research compiled by the Treeline Lurline project, the name came from a Queensland grazing station that was named after the owner's daughter.
So a German legend gave a name to a Queensland girl, who gave it to a pastoral station, which gave it to a Blue Mountains street. That is quite a journey for five syllables.
The Avenue of Trees
Within two decades of Clissold's subdivision, his 78 lots had been bought and built on. Lurline Street was filling up with cottages, shops, and the first guesthouses. In 1905, the Katoomba Municipal Council made a decision that would define the street's character for half a century. They planted an avenue of London Plane trees along Lurline Street, spacing them at intervals of 33 feet. The entire budget was twenty pounds.
Even at the time, there was grumbling about the cost and the quality of the tree guards. Councils and tree controversies are, it seems, eternal.
But the trees grew, and they grew beautifully. By the 1920s, photographs show a maturing avenue of Planes arching over the street, their dappled canopy creating a green corridor from the town centre toward the southern lookouts. A 1929 photograph captioned "Lurline In Snow" captures the avenue dusted with winter white. It is one of the most iconic images of old Katoomba.
By 1936, the trees were famous enough to be featured in the Sydney Mail as a model for national street tree planting. Lurline Street's Plane trees were, for a generation, one of the things that made Katoomba feel like Katoomba.
Then, sometime between 1957 and 1959, the council cut them all down.
The exact reasons are not well documented, but the timing tells the story. This was the era of modernisation, of road widening, of the conviction that cars mattered more than canopies. The trees were inconvenient. They were removed.
For the next fifty years, Lurline Street was a treeless corridor. Functional. A road, nothing more.
The Trees Come Back
In 2009, a Katoomba resident named Marie Wood started asking a question: what if we brought the trees back?
What began as one person's idea became a community campaign, then a formal project. The Treeline Lurline initiative spent years on advocacy, feasibility studies, community consultation, and applications for funding. In February 2022, the breakthrough came. The Federal Government awarded $4,004,275 in Black Summer Bushfire Recovery Grants to the Katoomba Chamber of Commerce and Community for Stage One of the Treeline Lurline project.
That the money came from bushfire recovery funding is fitting. The Black Summer fires of 2019 to 2020 burnt over 80 per cent of the Blue Mountains National Park. The Treeline project is, in part, an act of renewal: planting new life on a street that runs through a town shaped by fire.
Construction began in 2024. The new trees are Liquidambar styraciflua, American Sweetgum, chosen for their suitability to the climate and streetscape. The project includes not just trees but improved footpaths, undergrounding of powerlines, water-sensitive urban design, and heritage interpretation. The vision is to restore the kind of grandeur that the original Plane tree avenue provided.
Walk Lurline Street today and you will see the transformation underway. The young Liquidambars are in the ground. Give them twenty years and they will arch over the footpath just as the Planes once did. Give them fifty and nobody will remember the street without them.
A Street of Guesthouses
Between the early 1900s and the Second World War, Lurline Street became the centre of Katoomba's extraordinary guesthouse culture. The Cecil, built in 1912 as the Mount View. The Clarendon, opened in 1921. The Eldon, 1924. Villers Bret, 1921. The Majestic. Felton Woods Manor. Sans Souci. The Palais Royale. Name after name, each with its own story, each run more often than not by women, many of them widows who built businesses out of necessity and ran them with formidable skill.
Guests arrived by train from Sydney, were met at the station by cabbies, and settled into their guesthouse for a week or a fortnight. Days were spent touring the valleys in charabancs. Evenings were for dancing, roller-skating, and the cinema. The mountain air was supposed to put roses in your cheeks. Lurline Street was the beating heart of this world.
The guesthouse era peaked in the 1920s and 1930s, when Katoomba had over 60 operating at once. After the war, the culture faded. Coastal holidays, cheap overseas flights, the motor car. Many guesthouses were demolished or converted to nursing homes. The Clarendon survived and is now heritage protected. Others, like the Eldon, stand derelict.
But the tradition continues. Today Lurline Street is home to boutique hotels, bed and breakfasts, and holiday cottages that carry on the work those early guesthouse women started. The buildings change. The hospitality remains.
The Queen Drove Past
On Friday 12 February 1954, Queen Elizabeth II visited the Blue Mountains during the first visit of a reigning British monarch to Australia. The Royal Train arrived at Katoomba station at 3:40 in the afternoon. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were then driven along Lurline Street, lined with an estimated 75,000 people and 3,500 schoolchildren, for an eleven-minute Civic Reception at Echo Point.
Seventy-five thousand people. On a single street. In a town with a population of a few thousand.
Houses along Lurline Street were decorated with bunting and freshly painted. A massive arch across the street was "gay with flowers and bunting." The Blue Mountains Advertiser ran a competition for the best decorated home on the Royal route. The projecting platform at Echo Point was renamed the Queen Elizabeth II Platform afterward.
The Royal car drove the full length of Lurline Street, from the station to Echo Point. Every cottage, every guesthouse, every garden along the route was part of the spectacle. It was the biggest day in the street's history, and one of the biggest in the town's.
What the Street Means
In 1995, the Blue Mountains City Council identified Lurline Street as "the major route to Echo Point, a premier tourist attraction, and the most significant gateway within the Blue Mountains." That assessment is both true and incomplete.
Lurline Street is not just a route. It is a record. Every era of Katoomba's history is written into its 1.5 kilometres. The 1881 subdivision. The weatherboard cottages of the 1890s and 1900s. The guesthouse boom of the 1920s. The Plane trees planted and removed. The Royal Visit of 1954. The slow decline and patient revival. The bushfires. The Treeline project.
The street runs from the railway to the cliff edge. From the town that humans built to the landscape that was here for millions of years before them, and that the Dharug and Gundungurra peoples have known for at least 22,000 years. It is a walk between two worlds.
Next time you step out the front door and turn south toward the Three Sisters, take a moment. You are walking on history.
Our two heritage cottages sit in the northern stretch of Lurline Street, just 150 metres from the town centre and 300 metres from the station. Walk out the door and the whole story of Katoomba unfolds beneath your feet.
