Elizabeth That Was Part 4: Salisbury North (Elizabeth's "Poor Relation")

Salisbury North is a suburb in the City of Salisbury, part of the greater Adelaide conurbation in South Australia. It was built by the South Australian Housing Trust on a greenfield site in the early 1950s, the same decade work began on Elizabeth, mainly to house employees of the nearby Long Range Weapons Establishment, later the Weapons Research Establishment (or WRE). In 1947 the Commonwealth Government established the Long Range Weapons Establishment (LRWE) in partnership with the United Kingdom Government as a facility for research and development of rocket-propelled weapons. The support base for the rocket range at Woomera was at Penfield, on the northern side of the Adelaide-Port Augusta railway line, where a large munitions manufacturing complex had been built in 1941, 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) from the small rural centre of Salisbury. As with the munitions complex at the beginning of the war, in 1949 the location that was to become known as Salisbury North, immediately to its south, was no more than wheat paddocks on a flat alluvial plain. Through the paddocks ran Waterloo Corner Road, the main road leading north-west from Salisbury to Port Wakefield. The whole area was lightly populated, having a population of only 4,159 within the boundaries of the 200 square kilometres (77 sq mi) Salisbury District Council, including Salisbury itself. Many have argued, with some justification, that many of the mistakes made in the development of Salisbury North benefitted the new township of Elizabeth, as the South Australian Housing Trust made a concerted effort to avoid those mistakes when drawing up the new town's plans. This video examines how the mistakes made at Salisbury North, Elizabeth's "poor relation," benefitted the new town and its townspeople. Though as time would prove, Elizabeth itself would suffer many flaws in its planning. Flaws not obvious to begin with, but that would become apparent by the 1980s.