I’ve always liked maps (I reckon my favourite book when I was about 6 was a Sydney Street Directory), so I was interested to find this 1940 Fuller’s Adelaide street directory online.
I think anyone familiar with Adelaide will find it interesting to have a browse through some of the maps, here’s a few things I noticed:

• The extent of the tram system. I hadn’t realised there was such a large tram system in Adelaide, I note that in my area (St Peters) there was even a tram down 6th Avenue. In fact the majority of current day bus routes out of the city (major exception being the O-Bahn) are old tram routes.
• Frome St didn’t exist. Frome Rd ends in a T-junction at Nth Tce Rundle St (actually, Frome ends on Nth Tce but goes straight onto another street through to Rundle). It seems that Frome St was put together from various small cross streets at some later point.
• People complain now about East-West streets changing name, but it was even worse – Pulteney and Morphett streets both had different names on the South end of town. Lots of main roads around the city changed names along their routes as well (e.g. present day Greenhill Rd or South Rd )
• So many suburbs. If you think Adelaide has too many tiny suburbs now, it was much worse back then. There are many extra suburb names that are no longer in use.
• Goodwood Rd doesn’t connect to Ayliffe’s Rd, it just splits into a confusing maze of winding streets at the end!
• The area around Waterfall Gully looks a bit strange – Wyatts Rd comes through what is now a park to connect to Waterfall Gully Rd (which is plausible), but then extends to connect up with the top of Dashwood in what would be a rather improbably steep road by my reckoning. Similarly there is an extension of cross rd that goes dead straight until it connects with Mt Osmond Rd at the top of Mt Osmond … I’m suspecting that some of these roads might not be quite accurate.