Melbourne in Hundred Year Intervals
The Melbourne CBD as photographed in 1870–1875.
If you love Melbourne, it’s well worth staring at each of these photos, taking the time to locate each one, finding details of similarity and difference:
- Looking up La Trobe St from William St, you can see the State Library in the distance.
- Looking up MacArthur St from Spring St is so empty, and St Patrick’s doesn’t have its spires yet.
- The original St Paul’s is probably my favourite photo, so different to the site of today.
- Check out the electricity poles outside Customs House!
The biggest difference of all is the sense of scale. With the same wide streets that we have still today, but a dramatically lower height limit for its buildings, the Melbourne of the 1870s seems vaster.
Standing on the north-east corner of Exhibition and Bourke today you can get a glimpse of Melbourne in the 2070s. On the south-east corner is the Melbourne of today and yesterday: a 7-Eleven, with the Happy Palace Chinese Restaurant above it; behind this building is a square-based tower of a dozen storeys. On the south-west corner is Southern Cross SX1, a rectangular-based 39-storey glass monster, shadowed by its equally bland twin, the 22-storey SX2. Where older buildings stand back from the street, these new buildings seem to tower over them. The space above the intersection, once so open, is oppressed. The line from west to east is absurd. The two-storey building will have to go. Bourke St 2070 is George St Sydney. Wind will howl down it.
Our children will be as different from us as we are from those booming colonials. They will laugh at notions of “human” scale.
(If you want The Gernsback Continuum rather than Neuromancer, check out this 1954 plan for Melbourne.)