Cities, town urbanism, town planning, pretty photos of buildings, and the stories behind them.
Architecture
Sunshine’s own Garden City housing estate
October 20th, 2020
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In the early 20th century the Garden City town planning movement gained traction in Australia, with housing on spacious lots separated by manicured gardens. The suburb of Garden City in Port Melbourne is the best known local example, but there is a small pocket in the streets of Sunshine – the ‘Concrete Housing Estate’ on […]
1880s land boom houses in Sunshine
October 13th, 2020
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Melbourne’s inner suburbs are full of terraced houses dating back to the 1880s land boom, but there is an unexpected suburb where they can also be found – the back streets of Sunshine. Tracking them through time The Benjamin Street, south of Sunshine railway station, the row of single-fronted brick cottages appears on this 1934 […]
Trees in a Bunnings Warehouse car park
August 28th, 2020
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Car parks are usually known for their asphalt, not trees, but the Bunnings Warehouse in Sunshine tried their best. Google Street View, September 2016 With trees flanking the rows of parking. Google Maps, July 2016 But as part of the 2017 expansion of the store, every tree in the car park was chopped down. Google […]
Old and inappropriate subdivisions of Victoria
May 12th, 2020
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A recent theme on my blog has been “zombie subdivisions” – suburbs that were created but never took off, resulting in empty streets in the middle of nowhere. It turns out Victorian planing policy has an official name for them – “old and inappropriate subdivisions” and a method of dealing with them – “restructure overlays”. […]
Ghosts of the past beside the Princes Freeway
April 28th, 2020
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As a kid growing up in Geelong during the 1990s, driving up the Princes Freeway to Melbourne was a regular occurrence. Back then empty paddocks were a common sight, but today they are all gone except for one – a paddock between Kororoit Creek Road and the Laverton railway bridge. Exploring the paddock The bulk […]
