Justin Hemmes saved Sydney Swan’s favourite pub, The Alexandria Hotel in Redfern

ANOTHER quintessential Sydney watering hole will get a second chance thanks to pub baron Justin Hemmes, who yesterday announced he had saved The Alexandria Hotel from the wrecking ball.

Justin Hemmes has saved The Alexandria Hotel in Redfern from the wrecking ball. Picture: Justin Lloyd

• Justin Hemmes has stepped in to save another pub, a Swans favourite haunt, The Alexandria

ANOTHER quintessential Sydney watering hole will get a second chance thanks to pub baron Justin Hemmes, who yesterday announced he had saved The Alexandria Hotel from the wrecking ball.

Hemmes, who purchased the vacant pub sight unseen, said pubs were a part of Sydney’s heritage and needed to maintained.

“We are very lucky that we have got such beautiful pubs in this city and we don’t have a lot of history, as we are a very young city, but our pubs are iconic to our culture and a lot of them have fantastic architecture too, so we need to preserve them,” he said.

The Alexandria Hotel in Redfern. Picture: Gregg Porteous

It is an ethos Hemmes has long embraced, with The Alex just the latest in a long line of Sydney pubs Hemmes has refurbished, including The Coogee Pavilion, The Paddington and The Queen Victoria in Enmore.

There had been plans to replace The Alex with a four-storey residential tower — plans Hemmes learned about through a social media and community campaign to save the 1930s-built pub on Henderson Rd.

“It doesn’t take much to preserve them,” Hemmes said. “It takes a community to get behind them and be a voice and that’s why it came to my attention.

“I was shown a picture of it and thought it was beautiful ... and saw how loyal the community was to this space and how much it meant to them.

“I thought it can’t be redeveloped, there are so few left that we really need to save those things.”

The Alexandria Hotel is a popular pub to view sporting events. Picture: Brett Costello

The hotel is always buzzing when the Sydney Swans are playing away games.

The pub was previously leased by former Sydney Swans forward Darren “Harry” McAsey and was a favoured venue for fans to gather to watch away games.

But Hemmes said the venue was now empty and needed a lot of work.

“There’s been a fire sale ... it has been stripped bare, it’s just walls and the original bar is there but there are no fixtures, fittings, plumbing or kitchen,” he said.

“We are just going to bring it back, a clean and polish. We are going to keep it as it is. I want it to be just a great traditional pub where you can go out and have a beer.”

Former Swans forward, Harry McAsey, previously owned the hotel which came under attack by developers who wanted to knock it down to build unit blocks.

Adding it was a spur of the moment decision to buy the pub sight unseen, Hemmes said he hoped to enlist locals and previous The Alex regulars to become involved in the renovation.

“I want to employ them and have them do the works, to be the creative ones and really it becomes their project,” he said.

“It’s amazing how many people this pub has touched.”