Fitzroy

Fitzroy, 2 km north-east of Melbourne's Central Business District, was planned as Melbourne's first suburb. It was later also one of the city s first areas to gain municipal status. Its borders are Alexandra Parade (north), Victoria Parade (south), Smith Street (east) and Nicholson Street. Fitzroy is also Melbourne's smallest suburb in terms of area, being approximately 100 Ha.

Getting There: Take tram 112 from Collins Street or number 86 from Bourke Street and within 15 minutes you'll be deep in Fitzroy.

Inner suburban Fitzroy is Melbourne's bohemian heart. An edgy mix of alternative, artistic and trendy elements, it has a fascinating collection of young designer and retro clothes shops, bookshops, galleries, cafes and restaurants, and a vibrant nightlife. You'll get a feel for the suburb with a short walk along Brunswick Street, Fitzroy's backbone. Brunswick Street's cool cafes, restaurants and boisterous bars offer anything at any time, serving all-day breakfasts and coming alive at night with crowds of locals turning up to eat, drink and enjoy themselves. The area around Brunswick Street is a good place to get a no-nonsense, decent meal with gastro pubs like the Napier, the Rose and the Standard to choose from.

Fitzroy has a long associations with the working class and is currently inhabited by a wide variety of ethnicities and socio-economic groups and is known for a culture of bohemianism, being the main home of Melbourne's Fringe Festival. Its commercial heart is Brunswick Street, which is one of Melbourne's major retail, eating, and entertainment strips.

Nearby Smith Street is an interesting multicultural streetscape. Known for its vegetarian and whole foods, you'll also find plenty of budget-friendly Asian, Greek, Moroccan and Middle Eastern eateries, as well as an increasing number of stores stocking local designer wares. Gertrude Street is also emerging as a place to explore, with an odd collection of boutiques, cafes, pubs and bars. Situated between Brunswick and Smith streets, Johnston Street is Melbourne's Spanish quarter and has a range of tapas and flamenco bars. Every year the road is closed to host the two-day Hispanic-Latin-American festival. It's no surprise that bohemian Fitzroy is also the centre of the alternative Melbourne Fringe Festival every September/October.



Galleries: various kinds of street art adorn many buildings throughout Fitzroy. There are many small commercial art galleries, artist-run spaces and artist studios located within the suburb. Fitzroy has a thriving street art community and is also the home of Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and the Centre for Contemporary Photography.

Live performance: Fitzroy is a hub for live music in Melbourne, and plays host to several prominent venues; The Old Bar, Bar Open, the Evelyn Hotel, Gertrudes Brown Couch, and Cape Live. The well-known Punters Club was also located in the area; however, it was forced to close in 2002. During the late 1970s, Fitzroy was home to the little bands scene (also known as the North Fitzroy Beat ), which gave rise to experimental punk acts the Primitive Calculators and Ollie Olsen s Whirlywirld, rock group Hunters and Collectors and Lisa Gerrard, of Dead Can Dance.

Pubs and Nightlife: Fitzroy has a large number of pubs for such a small suburb. The former Devonshire Arms hotel was located in Fitzroy Street and remains the oldest building in Fitzroy. There are many other pubs in Fitzroy.

Cafes: The tiny suburb of Fitzroy has many cafes. Only one of the original three cafes is still standing - Marios. Bakers relocated north, and closed in 2007, while The Black Cat has transformed itself into a bar, but still retains its onstreet garden. In fact Silas is the oldest cafe, located between King William and Moore Streets, on the west side. With the advance of gentrification, a variety of cafes in different styles have opened up and down Brunswick Street, on Smith Street, parts of Gertrude Street and in some of the back streets, in former milk bars and warehouse sites.

Sport: The Fitzroy Football Club (the Fitzroy Lions) was formed in 1883, as part of the VFL/AFL. The club had some early success before relocating its home games several times and finally running into financial difficulties in the 1980s, forcing it to cede its AFL operations to Brisbane Bears at the end of 1996, upon which Brisbane changed their name to form the Brisbane Lions. After sponsoring various local clubs, Fitzroy returned as a playing club in its own right to play in the 2009 Victorian Amateur Football Association season and play out of the Brunswick Street Oval. The Fitzroy Baseball Club, known as the Fitzroy Lions, is a baseball club founded in 1889 to represent Fitzroy. The club has five senior teams competing in the Baseball Victoria Summer League, as well as junior sides representing the club at every age level. The Fitzroy Stars Football Club are an Indigenous club that joined the Northern Football League in 2008. They currently play their home games at Crispe Park in Reservoir. The Melbourne Chess Club, the oldest chess club in the southern hemisphere (est. 1866).

Fitzroy in In Popular Culture: Australian musicians have also made mention of Fitzroy in their lyrics. Clare Bowditch made a reference to Fitzroy in the song Divorcee by 23, as did the musical comedian The Bedroom Philosopher in the song Northcote (So Hungover). Most notably, ARIA award winner Dan Sultan has the song Old Fitzroy, the black and white video for which is shot entirely in Fitzroy, featuring shots of and from Atherton Gardens, as well as shots of a number of Fitzroy pubs.

The 2010 Australian television show Offspring was set almost entirely in Fitzroy. The main characters of the show were often seen at the Black Cat, a Brunswick Street bar. Fitzroy has also featured in episodes of a number of Australian TV shows, including City Homicide and Rush (notably in Season 3, where the team shot at Fitzroy Town Hall to commemorate the death of a former colleague).

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Suburban Heritage Study: North Fitzroy


North Fitzroy was one of Melbourne's early residential commuter suburbs, being served by train and cable tram services linking it to the city by 1888. It features extensive Boom era terrace buildings and closely built row housing, providing evidence of the effects of public transport on early development. It is a well preserved Boom-era suburb that, despite the abrupt economic collapse of the early 1890s, continued developing during the Great Depression years and into the first decades of the 20th century due to the amenity of its planning, parkland, local schools and shops and extensive public transport. This yielded both the generous frontages and sizes of the post-Depression villa houses and the row house forms and narrow frontages of the Boom era.

North Fitzroy has traditional Victorian-era residential character, evoked by the formal presentation of the decorated facade to the street with its small ornamental front garden, low front fence, pedestrian gateway and front path, with the functional necessities of delivering coal, removal of nightsoil and occasional stabling provided by the back lanes. Its landmark buildings and sites formed key meeting places in the area during the main development era of the 1860s to the 1930s,including religious institutions, schools, monasteries and churches, and the buildings associated with charitable bodies such as the Salvation Army, Church of Christ Bible School, and the temperance movement.

Also the former Nth Fitzroy Police Station, the former Licensed Victualler's School and Asylum site and complexes such as the Old Colonists Homes, the asphalt footpaths, pitched lanes, gutters and lane crossovers and mature street and individual plantings (such as mature elms, planes, palms, and Kurrajongs) reinforce the unified character of the dense, relatively low-rise residential development. The outstanding Victorian and Edwardian-era streetscapes such as those surrounding the Edinburgh Gardens (Alfred Crescent, St Georges Road, Brunswick and Freeman Streets), include a rich collection of Victorian-era Gothic and Italianate style buildings interspersed with fine buildings from the Edwardian period.

Heritage Study and Report >>

Heritage Study: Brunswick Street


Brunswick Street Heritage Overlay Area was among the first of Fitzroy's streets to develop commercially. By 1854, subdivision was near completed and according to one source, '.shops rivalling those in Bourke-street, Melbourne, were to be found in Brunswick-street'. The 1860s-1870s was a period of consolidation in Brunswick Street, as the rude structures of the early decades were replaced with more substantial premises. A cable tram (since electrified) aided Brunswick Street development from the late 1880s.

Aided by the North Fitzroy cable-tram service started in 1886, development of the street, and its architectural character, was virtually complete by the turn of the century, with a number of the original buildings being replaced in the Edwardian-era. After the Second War, there was a high concentration of migrant occupation and small-scale industrial use of many of the shops in the mid 20th century. This low intensity use helped to preserve the buildings, including a high proportion of 19th century shop fronts. The street developed from the late 1970s as one of Melbourne's best-known and popular strip of bohemian cafes, bars, restaurants, hotels, bookshops and other boutiques.

Heritage Study and Report >>

History of Fitzroy


Fitzroy was Melbourne's first suburb, created in 1839 when the area between Melbourne and Alexandra Parade (originally named Newtown) was subdivided into vacant lots and offered for sale. Newtown was later renamed Collingwood, and the area now called Fitzroy (west of Smith Street) was made a ward of the Melbourne City Council. Surrounded as it was by a large number of factories and industrial sites in the adjoining suburbs, Fitzroy was ideally suited to working men's housing, and from the 1860s to the 1880s, Fitzroy's working class population rose dramatically. The area's former mansions became boarding houses and slums, and the heightened poverty of the area prompted the establishment of several charitable, religious and philanthropic organisations in the area over the next few decades. A notable local entrepreneur was Macpherson Robertson, whose confectionery factories engulfed several blocks and stand as heritage landmarks today.

Before World War I, Fitzroy was a working-class neighborhood, with a concentration of political radicals already living there. Postwar immigration into the suburb resulted in the area becoming socially diverse. Many working-class Chinese immigrants also settled in Fitzroy due to its proximity to Chinatown, with also a noticeable Vietnamese community; a small enclave of Africans lives there, and the area (particularly Johnston Street) serves as a centre of Melbourne's Hispanic community, with many Spanish and Latin American-themed restaurants, clubs, bars and some stores. Like other inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, Fitzroy underwent a process of gentrification during the 1980s and 1990s. The area's manufacturing and warehouse sites were converted into apartments, and the corresponding rising rents in Fitzroy saw many of the area's residents move to Northcote and Brunswick.