Sometimes the city streets seem so fixed – apartment blocks and shops and street signs are such planned things.

I love moments of change – not so much when restaurants or other businesses fail, that’s always sad – but those moments of transition when a house or a warehouse implodes to form something new, they’re totally exciting for me.

The Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst, warehouse below has been in redevelopment for months. At first, you could peek in and see the hollowed out shell. But now it’s pretty dark and full of floors.

I guess I just like moments when you realise how ephemeral the buildings and structures of the city are, it makes me like them a lot more.

True, this is no ‘vertical garden’. There won’t be any eating from this bio-wall. If anything, it’s most likely eating into the walls of its host, the old Brackenbury & Austin warehouse on the corner of Wilshire and Devonshire Streets, Surry Hills, just up from the Bourke Street Bakery.

This is far from technologically based solutions to greening the city. It’s old school, the paint’s decomposing a rusty orange, the walls are sprouting all manner of ivy and even small trees. There are mandalas and Nepalese prayer flags, even a squiggly painted ‘Respect’ on the wall. And at some point in the distant past, it looks as though some of the plants may have sprouted from pots at the front door.

Looks like they’re struggling to fill the front space, too. There’s a sign out the front advertising it as a potential pop-up shop.

It’s a series of craggy mountain tops, set in pink – each mountain seems to have a letter, but I can’t make sense of it – it’s out the back of Gineico Marine‘s Devonshire Street warehouse, on Esther Street and Esther Lane.

There are quite a few other bits of street art on the block – see local blog Acid Midget for more. Little stencil galleries like this are tucked away across Darlinghurst and Surry Hills, I wonder whether the work tends to cluster because of a lack of monitoring, support from residents and local businesses, or just that once one person’s done a stencil at a spot, others want to join them.