Carlton

The inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton was the place where the city's famous cafe culture was born with the arrival of Melbourne's first espresso machine at one of the street's Italian-owned cafes in the 1950s.

Getting There: Carlton is served by many of Melbourne's tram routes, running along Swanston Street and terminating at Melbourne University. Tram routes 8 and 1 continue through to Carlton North and beyond via Lygon Street. Buses serve Carlton via Lygon, Elgin, and Rathdowne Streets. There are currently no trains to Carlton, with the closest station beingMelbourne Central Station.

The suburb is well known for its Little Italy  precinct on Lygon Street, for its Victorian architecture and its European-style squares (University Square, Lincoln Square, Argyle Place and MacArthur Place) and the Carlton Gardens, the latter being the location of the Royal Exhibition Building, one of Australia s few man-made sites with World Heritage status. Little Italy is crammed with double-storey Victorian terraces featuring endless cafes and restaurants serving steaming bowls of pasta, espresso and delicious gelati.

Further down Lygon Street there are bookshops, galleries and plenty of shops selling the latest European and Australian fashions. Don't miss the Lygon Street Festa in October - a celebration of traditional and contemporary Italian culture and one of Australia s largest outdoor street festivals.

Carlton Gardens is home to the World Heritage listed Royal Exhibition Building, behind which is the Melbourne Museum, which houses everything from dinosaur bones and Melbourne Cup hero Phar Lap, to a full set from popular TV soap, Neighbours. It also features touring exhibitions and the spectacular IMAX movie experience.

At the other end of Carlton is Melbourne's General Cemetery, the final resting place of some larger than life Australians including Burke and Wills, Eureka Stockade activist Peter Lalor and one-time Prime Minister Robert Menzies. Carlton is thought to have been named after Carlton House, London.

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Carlton's Architecture


Carlton is home to some of Melbourne's most historically significant buildings such as Melbourne Trades Hall and the World Heritage Site of the Carlton Gardens, the Royal Exhibition Building and the ruins of the old Carlton Brewery, a collection of buildings constructed between 1864 and 1927, all listed on the Victorian Heritage Register. The Carlton Gardens are also home to the Melbourne Museum.

Carlton has many 19th century public buildings. The Carlton Club, which was built in 1889 by Inskip & Robertson, is notable for its decorative Australian native kangaroo gargoyles and polychrome Florentine arches. The Carlton Post Office and Police Station are both fine Renaissance Revival styled buildings. The Carlton Court House on Drummond Street was designed in the Gothic style by G.B.H Austin and constructed between 1888 and 1889. The Lygon Buildings on Lygon Street were built in 1888 in the Mannerist style. Carlton Gardens Primary School, on Rathdowne Street, opened in 1884.

Many heritage registered Victorian terrace houses can be found on Drummond Street, a long wide boulevard flanked by grand homes, including Rosaville (No.46 built 1883), Medley Hall (No.48 built 1892-93), Drummond Terrace (No.93-105 built 1890-91), Lothian Terrace (No.175-179 built 1865-69), Terraces at 313&315 (1889), Police Station (No.330 built 1878) and Court House (no345-355 built 1887-88).

Notable public spaces

The Bali Memorial, which commemorates the victims of the 2002 Bali bombings, is located in Lincoln Square. It was officially opened on 12 October 2005, the third anniversary of the explosion that killed 202 innocent people, including 88 Australians. The northern part of Argyle Square, adjacent to Lygon Street, has been redeveloped into an Italian piazza, known as Piazza Italia, in a joint project between the City of Melbourne and its twin city, Milan. A giant sundial is the main feature of the piazza.

Notable Buildings


1888 - former Melbourne Teachers College, University of Melbourne, 156-292 Grattan Street, Carlton, Vic
Building was built as a residential teacher training institution for the Victorian Education Department, it is sited on the University of Melbourne reserve, on a section of land which had remained undeveloped by the university in the 1880s. The building, which displays strong Queen Anne style influences, is one of the oldest buildings of its style in Victoria. The 1888 building also appears to draw directly on the formality and planning of training establishment precedents in England from the same period, notably the co-educational Homerton College in London. The 1888 Building was constructed in three phases between 1889 and 1892 to Public Works Department designs. The plans were prepared by architect GBH Austin under the supervision of JH Marsden. The main facade of the tuck-pointed red brick structure is a clear expression of the English Queen Anne style, although flanking wings are more restrained and Elizabethan in character. The building comprises a central block with main entrance, lecture halls and library, and is flanked by dormitory wings to the east and west to form an E-shaped plan. Male students were located in the west wing and female students in the east wing. Lecture rooms were also segregated.

1876-77 - former Faraday Street Primary School, 249 Faraday Street, Carlton, Vic
The Kathleen Syme Education Centre is a two storey polychromatic brick structure with a slate roof and shallow eaves. A central gable and tower with a bellcast roof form the central element of the asymmetrical facade to Faraday Street. The end pavilions have pyramidal roofs. The window openings to both storeys are variously square-headed, arch, segmental arch or depressed pointed arch. Most of the windows were enlarged in 1908 to from single openings from pairs of pointed arch windows. There are Gothic-style buttresses to the ground floor. The string courses are emphasised by use of cream colour bricks. Rear wings constructed of brick were added in 1927. Architect: Reed & Barnes


Melbourne International Flower and Garden Show at the Royal Exhibition Building

Royal Exhibition Building, Nicholson Street, Carlton, Vic.
In 1888 the Melbourne Centennial Exhibition was held to promote the centenary of European settlement in Australia. This exhibition was officially opened for six months and the attendance was just over two million, nearly double the population of Melbourne at the time. It still qualifies as the biggest event ever held in Melbourne, surpassing the 1956 Olympic Games. Since then the building has hosted a wide variety of local, national and international events, including trade exhibitions, conventions, concerts and performances, sporting fixtures, lectures, demonstrations and a range of important civic events. The most important of these was the opening of the first Commonwealth Parliament of Australia on 9th May 1901, by the Duke of Cornwall and York, the heir to the throne. In 1879-80 the main exhibition hall stood with two brick annexes to its east and west. There was also a series of temporary halls of timber and corrugated iron. These were dismantled at the end of the exhibitions and reused for a variety of purposes.
The brick annexes were used at the 1888-1889 Centennial International Exhibition as machinery halls. In 1901, the western annexe was converted to accommodate the Parliament of Victoria while the new Federal Parliament met in the State Parliament Building. The western annexe was demolished during the 1960s. The eastern annexe was partly demolished in the 1950s, and the remainder replaced in 1979 by a mirror-fronted Convention Centre.

1970 - Plumbing Trades Employees Union of Australia Building, 52 Victoria Street, Carlton, Vic.
A Brutalist front is the dominant feature of this relatively small commercial property in Melbourne CBD's north. Architect: Graeme Gunn


The Church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart

1910 - The Church of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, Rathdowne Street, Carlton, Vic
Although never completed, this church is of architectural significance as one of the first and finest full blown red brick Baroque church designs in Victoria, and the second classically styled Catholic church built in Victoria. The new church was designed by Tappin Gilbert and Dennehy and constructed in 1897-99 of red brick with unpainted cement render dressings in the Baroque style. A chapel and large dome were proposed in the original design but never constructed. The remarkable interior decoration is by A F D Cavallaro who arrived in Australia from Italy in 1899. The altar in the new church was relocated from St Patricks Cathedral where it had been originally installed in 1868. The interior is of aesthetic significance for exhibiting a richness of decoration particularly the paintings by A F D Cavallaro, executed on canvas and then fixed to the elliptical barrel vaulted ceiling. The encaustic tiled floor by the Australian Tessellated Tile Company, stained glass by Hardman of Birmingham, and Brooks Robinson of Melbourne, Stations of the Cross by J Hennessey, and altar decorated by Ferguson, Urie and Lyon are also important elements. Architects: Reed, Smart & Tappin.


Newman College

1916-18, Newman College, University of Melbourne, Swanson Street, Parkville, Vic
One of Melbourne's and Australia's most unique and eccentric buildings, this unusual architectural gems is a Neogothic style Art Deco rotunda. Newman College is associated with the works of husband and wife team, Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mohony, whose reputations in Australia have increased markedly since the 1960s. The college building was constructed in stages - the wing on the north side of the chapel, designed by the Griffins and constructed from 1916-1918, enclosed the garden square on the east and north sides, and partially enclosed the garden square's south and west sides. The northern rotunda and flanking offices, kitchen, staff quarters and dormitory wings ending in a swimming pool (natatorium) and classrooms were completed by 1917. The chapel, constructed from 1938-42 and the 1960s west wing were designed by other architects.
Suburban Heritage Study: North Carlton


Land that was to become North Carlton and Princes Hill, developed from the 1850s as an outpost of Melbourne Town, with a blue stone quarry reserve, an associated penal station, and the Melbourne General Cemetery as the main attributes set among native woodland. North Carlton was surveyed in 1869 as an extension for Melbourne's residential suburbs. The new half-acre blocks extended as far as Fenwick St, continuing the north-south grid of Carlton, with 30 metre frontage allotments served by generous 20 and 30 metre wide government roads. Reserves were set aside for public buildings and gardens. The renowned surveyor, Clement Hodgkinson, was the initiator of the 1869 North Carlton plan, as head of the Crown Lands and Survey Department.

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Carlton Gardens


One of Melbourne's finest showcase gardens, the Carlton Gardens is a World Heritage Site located on the northeastern edge of the Central Business District in the suburb of Carlton. The 26 hectare (64 acre) site contains the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne Museum and Imax Cinema, tennis courts and an award winning children's playground. The rectangular site is bound by Victoria Street, Rathdowne Street, Carlton Street, and Nicholson Street. From the Exhibition building the gardens gently slope down to the southwest and northeast. According to the World Heritage listing the Royal Exhibition Buildings and Carlton Gardens are "of historical, architectural, aesthetic, social and scientific (botanical) significance to the State of Victoria."

The gardens are an outstanding example of Victorian landscape design with sweeping lawns and varied European and Australian tree plantings consisting of deciduous English oaks, White Poplar, Plane trees, Elms, Conifers, Cedars, Turkey Oaks, Araucarias and evergreens such as Moreton Bay Figs, combined with flower beds of annuals and shrubs. A network of tree lined paths provide formal avenues for highlighting the fountains and architecture of the Exhibition building. This includes the grand allee of plane trees that lead to the exhibition building. Two small ornamental lakes adorn the southern section of the park. The northern section contains the Museum, tennis courts, maintenance depot and curator's cottage, and the children's playground designed as a Victorian maze.






Exhibition Building


Rathdowne Street, Carlton