The Canberra of the East: Liberty Grove

You know how Canberra's entire thing is being a planned city? Well this next suburb seems to be that, in Canada Bay suburb form.

Liberty Grove

In my previous suburb of Concord West, you can find these gateless gates. 

They lead to this pedestrian path, 

and this suburb. The welcome sign calls this place "the lifestyle suburb of the new millennium", with all of the optimism that the Olympic and dot-com era brought with it. Now, this new millenium has so far hosted such events as The War on Terror, The Great Recession, The Pandemic and Donald Trump, so it will be interesting to see what the relatively recent people of the past thought the future will look like. 

Like this, it turns out. 

So at first glance, Liberty Grove appears to be a relatively modern townhouse complex,

and that's because it is.  

But regardless, this townhouse complex has been designated as a suburb, and it's my duty so see what's the go. 

Taking a stroll through reveals a place with a good amount of semi-public green space 

narrow streets,

and this fountain. 

Perhaps unexpectedly, not all of the houses look identical here. For instance, some of them deviate from the usual 1990s townhouse motif in order to look like this. 

Now, the narrow streets are an interesting one. All of the streets of this suburb are supposed to be 20km/h pedestrian and car shared zones. My optimistic side says that's a good thing, 

my cynical side suspects it was just a method to avoid building footpaths in order to extract a couple extra metres of real estate for each house.  

Truth be told though, I don't dislike this place. Unlike Breakfast Point, another townhouse complex stretched into suburb form, Liberty Grove doesn't have horror movie vibes and seems perfectly reasonable. 

They have a very pleasant looking pool,

enough parkland to go around, 

including a separate toddlers playground,

with this pleasing bench.

Hmm.

Community facilities include things like a gym and tennis court, 

and of course, a community notice board. Today's notices include a dog walker, and the community Facebook page which I'm sure had a post on the day of my visit along the lines of "did anybody see that dodgy looking guy walking around taking photos?" 

Anyway, having seen what there is to be seen in Liberty Grove, 

I carried on back to my previous suburb, 

via this path, 

which floods, 

and this under-rail tunnel,

which floods. 

The other end of that rail line is Concord West once again. 

Liberty Grove: A townhouse complex pretending to be a suburb.