Newtown is Sydney's most countercultural neighbourhood, a dense strip of terrace houses, vintage shops, vegan restaurants, live music venues and LGBTQ+ bars stretching along King Street about four kilometres southwest of the CBD. It is the kind of neighbourhood that has absorbed repeated waves of gentrification without quite losing its edge — partly because the university (University of Sydney) keeps the student population high, and partly because rents along King Street have somehow stayed lower than equivalent strips elsewhere.
King Street is the spine, running about two kilometres from Newtown station south to Enmore. Every cuisine is represented somewhere along it, from Korean to Ethiopian to the Vietnamese pho joints that have been here since the 1980s. The vintage and second-hand shops are genuinely good — this is where Sydneysiders go when they want something other than what the mall sells. On weekends the street is busy from mid-morning until late. The Enmore Theatre at the southern end is one of Sydney's best mid-size live music venues.