Kings Cross, New South Wales

Kings Cross is a former suburb that is now an inner-city locality of Sydney. It is also the site of an underground railway station on the Eastern Suburbs Line. Sydneysiders often refer to it using the affectionate colloquialism "the Cross".

Kings Cross is located approximately 1.5 kilometres east of the centre of Sydney and consists chiefly of a retail and entertainment precinct extending approximately 100 metres along both sides of Darlinghurst Road. The area is encompassed within the suburbs of Potts Point and Elizabeth Bay, which have both been administered by the Sydney City Council since March, 2004.

Known as Queen's Cross until the early 20th century, it was renamed King's Cross after Edward VII of the United Kingdom. The "cross" is a reference to the major intersection formed by William Street and Darlinghurst Road, which forms the locality's southernmost limit.

The Kings Cross district was Sydney's bohemian heartland from the early decades of the 20th Century. From the 1960s onwards it also came to serve as both the city's main tourism accommodation and entertainment mecca, as well as its red light district - thereby achieving a high level of notoriety out of all proportion to its limited geographical extent. During this latter phase drug-related crime was one of the areas' main social problems, and this led to the controversial establishment of Australia's first legal drug injecting room (where users of illegal drugs can inject themselves in clean conditions without harassment) at a shopfront site near Kings Cross railway station in May, 2001. The injecting room is credited with saving the lives of some 1000 injecting drug users who have overdosed at the facility since its inception.

Since the turn of the century Kings Cross has witnessed a large number of real estate developments - both refurbishments of historic apartment buildings, and the construction of new ones - and this has resulted in demographic changes that are significantly altering the character of the area.