Horse 1644 - Ten Suburbs. No.15 Beverley Hills 2209

The suburb was originally named Dumbleton after a farm which had been established in the 1830s but as you'd expect, residents scarcely like the name very much at all. The name was changed to Beverley Hills in the 1940s during the so-called "golden age of Hollywood" but suburb in Sydney really had very little to do with a world of movie stars. I will admit though that 70 years later, Sydney's Beverley Hills is a far nicer place than Los Angeles' which can look pretty trashy in some areas.

Beverley Hills would have remained a relatively dull had it not been for the Department of Main Road's decision to connect Canary's Road and Dumbleton Road in 1962 and rename the new route King Georges Road as part of Ring Road 3. Thus a quiet suburb would have a six lane arterial road slice in in twain in 1964. A lot of the shop fronts on King Georges Road have a sort of late art deco look which were built during that time.

Also and as a result of the post-war immigration boom, Beverley Hills became home to a lot of Italan and Eastern European migrants arrive; which changed the area from mainly Protestant to mainly Catholic. One of the results of this was the very fine Regina Coeli church which stands on the highest point in the suburb and may been seen for many miles.
Regina Coeli Roman Catholic Church is the only "war memorial church" in Australia. Regina Coeli was opened on Coral Sea Sunday, May 5, 1963, 21 years after the aircraft carrier battle of World War Two. It was partly funded by an Australian-US veterans' alliance and commemoration masses are held every year on that weekend.

Ironically, if you look for something that Beverley Hills is noted for, it is its local cinema. Even though it looks like any other local suburban cinema, look inside and... it still looks like any other local suburban cinema. The local cinema actually appears to be a thing of note in this suburb; that is noteworthy. Beverley Hills is a blob of normality among a sea of mediocrity.
Although Beverley Hills was named after a land of swimming pools and movie stars, it is a land of red brick houses and medium density housing as far as the eye can see, where there is the odd swimming pool but no movie stars. Beverley Hills is a land of the national average. A land where Toyota Corollas live in the streets, where people make almost exactly bang on the national average and where it really is difficult to find anything interesting about it at all.
Beverley Hills is almost a living snapshot of what all of Australia currently is, in miniature. It is the perfect representative sample, all by itself.