Hosier Lane and the Hidden City Inside Melbourne's Gold-Rush Grid

Hosier Lane changes weekly, and that single fact tells you how to read the whole hidden city folded inside Melbourne's gold-rush grid. The lane is a narrow, bluestone-cobbled service alley running through to Flinders Lane, and it is the city's best-known open-air gallery of street art, stencils and installations. Because it works as a de-facto free-to-paint area that needs no permit, the walls are repainted constantly. What you are looking at almost certainly did not exist a month ago and may be gone next week. Start here, and the rest of Melbourne's laneways and arcades start to make sense: they are all the same hidden layer, folded into the gaps of a wide and rational grid, each one repaying an unhurried, self-paced walk.

Why the lanes exist at all

Melbourne was laid out as a plain rectangular grid, public and confident by design. Then gold was found in Victoria in the eighteen fifties, and the town grew rich almost overnight. That sudden fortune filled the gaps between the grand official streets with a maze of narrow service lanes, and, grander still, with glass-roofed shopping arcades in the European fashion. In the nineteenth century, the quarter around Hosier Lane was a seedy back district, one of those service alleys threaded between the wide official streets. Melbourne's entire laneway street-art culture grew out of these narrow, unglamorous gaps. So the constant change on Hosier Lane's walls is not an accident of fashion. It is the natural life of a place built to be unglamorous and overlooked, now claimed as the soul of the city.

Hosier Lane began as a Street Art Gallery under the City Lights Initiative in nineteen ninety-eight. In November twenty thirteen, a single major paint-up called All Your Walls brought over one hundred local graffiti and street artists to work these walls at once. The lane has had darker moments too. In early twenty twenty, a masked group sprayed over the art with paint-filled canisters roughly the size of fire extinguishers, an act the Lord Mayor called a vandalism attack, and new work reappeared almost immediately. That speed of recovery is the whole point: this is a gallery you can never see twice, and it heals faster than anyone can erase it.

The square that argues back

Cross Flinders Street from the painted lane and you meet one of the newest and most argued-over layers of the city. Federation Square opened in two thousand two on the site of the former Jolimont railway yards, roofing directly over the through-lines into Flinders Street Station. Lab Architecture Studio, whose directors Donald Bates and Peter Davidson worked from London, designed it in a deconstructivist style: angular geometry in ochre Western Australian sandstone and glass, with metallic shards framing the open space. It was controversial from the start, criticised for blocking views of the cathedral behind it and for its jagged look.

What matters most here lies beneath the architecture. Melbourne stands on the Country of the Wurundjeri of the Kulin nations, the traditional owners of the Melbourne area, whose living culture continues today. The square houses the Koorie Heritage Trust, a living Aboriginal institution that acknowledges the Wurundjeri and the wider Kulin nations. The gold-rush grid this walk keeps reading was laid over that Country, and this square puts the older presence at the very centre of the modern city.

Where the gold money went to be seen

From the raw painted lane, the walk turns to its opposite: the arcades where the gold money went to display itself. The Block Arcade, built between eighteen ninety-one and eighteen ninety-three by the firm Twentyman and Askew, is one of the great interiors of the boom city. Look down at the mosaic-tiled floor, up at the glass canopy carried on cast and wrought iron, and out to the octagonal central rotunda. The whole conception was inspired by Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele the Second of the eighteen seventies. Its name carries a piece of social history: "doing the Block" was the fashionable Victorian promenade along Collins Street, well established by the eighteen eighties, when the writer Fergus Hume likened it to London's Bond Street and the boulevards of Paris. To do the Block was to see and be seen, walking slowly in your best clothes past shopfronts of glass and gilt.

A short walk on brings the oldest of them all. The Royal Arcade opened in eighteen seventy, to a design by Charles Webb, and it is the oldest surviving shopping arcade in Australia. Its marvel waits at the northern end. The carved wooden giants Gog and Magog, figures out of British legend, were added in eighteen ninety-three, flanking a clock associated with the jeweller and watchmaker Gaunt. The clock triggers the giants' arms so they strike the bells on the hour. Stand near them a few minutes before the hour, and wait. This is the climax the whole route turns toward: an interior street from the morning of the gold rush, with mythic giants keeping its time.

The public spine and the oldest quarter

The Royal Arcade delivers you into the Bourke Street Mall, the pedestrian retail spine of the boom city, where trams still run right through the crowds. Overlooking it stands the former General Post Office, begun in eighteen sixty-one, its facade rising in tiers of columns: Tuscan, Ionic and Corinthian, one order per level. It kept the city's mail for well over a century until postal operations ceased by two thousand and one. This is the grid at its most public, a deliberate contrast to the hidden arcades.

The walk closes in a quarter as old as the fortune that built everything else. Chinatown, centred on Little Bourke Street, grew directly from the gold rush after gold was found in Victoria in eighteen fifty-one. By the late eighteen fifties, the colony's Chinese population had reached about forty-five thousand, drawn to what they called the New Gold Mountain. It is described as the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the Western world, a street held without a break for over a century and a half, and it endured through the immigration restrictions that followed federation in nineteen oh one.

Over a little more than two kilometres and roughly seventy minutes, across seven stops, this is a hidden layer you read at your own pace, with no group and no one hurrying you on. Start planning your visit to Melbourne, or read more about the route in the Historic Center: Gold-Rush Melbourne and its Laneways walk.

Sources

• Hosier Lane, Wikipedia. Origin as a City Lights Initiative Street Art Gallery in 1998, the November 2013 All Your Walls paint-up, and the unregulated, ever-changing character of the walls.
• Block Arcade and Royal Arcade, Wikipedia. Construction dates, the Milanese model for the Block, and the Gog and Magog giants added in 1893.
• Federation Square, Wikipedia. Opening in 2002 over the Jolimont yards, the Lab Architecture design, and the Koorie Heritage Trust.
• Chinatown, Melbourne, Wikipedia. Growth from the 1851 gold rush, the Little Bourke Street settlement, and its claim as the longest continuous Chinese settlement in the Western world.
• General Post Office, Melbourne, Wikipedia and Victorian Heritage Database. Construction from 1861, the stacked Tuscan, Ionic and Corinthian orders, and the closure of postal operations in 2001.