Melbourne’s Laneways: A Rich Culture pumping Through a City’s Veins.
There are cities known for their rivers, there are cities known for their churches. Some have beautiful festivals centred around their impressive horticultural prowess and others have festivals celebrating their vibrant community using vivid lighting and nightly firework displays. Then there is Melbourne, a city that embraces the back alley, the laneways once used only to access the backs of impressive retail outlets. Melbourne has become so synonymous with its laneway culture that 4 of its biggest attractions are cramped graffiti covered spaces. In fact if you visit the Visit Victoria website you’ll see a section dedicated to City Laneways, that recommends almost 30 laneways that you should visit while staying in Melbourne. There is even a damn music festival that launched in a laneway and has become a national event!
Hardware lane offers great retaurants and wine bars.
I moved to Melbourne at the tail end of 2022 and had visited many times prior and have always been a little confused on how the laneways phenomenon started. How did this one city do such a good job of changing the image of laneways from creepy dark places that you would for sure get mugged in, to a reason to visit the city? (And how high in demand is the PR person who was able to get it to this level.)
This photo was taken in one of Melbourne’s less attractive laneways behind Chinatown.
To achieve the full understanding of laneways in Melbourne we need to go all the way back to 1836, the year Robert Hoddle was asked to survey the fledgling settlement of Melbourne by Sir Richard Bourke the governor of New South Wales. Hoddle was instructed to survey large blocks, with little streets between each to allow for rear access. Bourke had obviously been experiencing some planning issues with Sydney and thought that these little streets would cut down on crowding in the main streets. This area was known as the Hoddle Grid (named after Robert Hoddle) and is what makes up most of the CBD. I didn’t realise until writing this article, but if you look at a street view of Melbourne, the CBD has been aligned with the river meaning that it sits diagonally compared to the rest of Melbourne. As the Gold Rush of the 1850s progressed Melbourne grew rapidly and continued to follow the instructions of large blocks with little back streets, leading to the creation of 100 laneways. This was a design unique to Melbourne, largely due to the planners in charge, there doesn’t seem to be any geographical or environmental advantages for them. Brisbane for example was developed and officially surveyed much later and the planners obviously felt little streets were not as necessary.
An alleyway fulfilling its traditional use as a home for garbage cans
While most of the lanes became dumping grounds for waste and discarded furniture a few became homes to bustling lower class communities. In the early 1850s the district of Little Lon (Little Lonsdale) started popping! This district was quite undesirable which led to the cost of living being significantly lower than other areas, making the area a hub for immigrant families and single mothers working for very little money. As often happens with lower class areas the residents fell into making money in questionable ways. Chinese residents of Little Lon bought the mystical world of Opium to the doorstep of Melbournians and provided cozy little dens and all the equipment needed to partake. Originally opening dens to provide their homesick countrymen with a much-needed taste of home, European settlers quickly discovered a passion for the eastern delight and the importation of opium increased by 5x into the late 1800s. These Dens were often run out the back of cigar, grocery or liquor stores, bringing a much-welcomed break from the monotony of 19th century Melbourne.
Little Lonsdale’s business district was quite popular with those who wanted to lie on their backs. Known as Melbourne’s Red-Light District, the other popular business at the time was prostitution. Women who had moved to the area found that it was necessary to offer themselves, to provide for their families. These women would stand on the street corners waiting on men to walk past to make a few dollars. Prostitution was not illegal in the 1800s and brothels were scattered across the district. Madame Brussles was incredibly popular amongst the elite, with politicians being regular patrons. This was not a glamorous business, with many of these women suffering major abuse from their clientele and the unhygienic environment provided by Little Lon would often lead to life threatening diseases. The district of Little Lonsdale was bought out and demolished in the 1950s to gentrify this section of the CBD displacing the residents across the inner suburbs, one being Fitzroy and our Western Suburbs.
Alright, we crammed a lot of history in there. I know it was a lot, but I found it really interesting learning about the history of laneway usage, because Melbourne’s laneways did start like every other city with Alleyways. As a hub for crime! So now we can talk about how the conversations surrounding Melbourne’s laneways shifted from ‘I went down a laneway, smoked some opium and got robbed’ to ‘I went down a laneway, had a cheeky Marg and a 5-star pasta dish then stayed in my multi-million-dollar Airbnb with laneway access’.
People eating in in Centre Place
It's 1994, O.J Simpson just did a runner in his bronco, the PlayStation just came out in Japan leaving Australians with the biggest case of FOMO in history, and Victoria just made some massive changes to its liquor laws to benefit the brand-new Crown Casino precinct. Liquor laws up until this point had required bars to serve food, meaning that all bars needed to have a fully operable kitchen as well as their bar and a seating area. That’s a lot of overhead for a startup bar. A group of architects called Six Degrees working on Meyers Place needed a hangout spot and decided to capitalize on the new liquor laws and the cheap rent available in the laneways of Melbourne. Meyers Place Bar became the first of the modern Melbourne Laneways Bars. The group scrounged together $25,000 and took inspiration from a Japanese art reminiscent of upcycling and the small street accessible bars found in the streets of bustling Japanese cities to create their bar. By using second-hand building materials, notably floorboards from the renovation of Town Hall traded for a carton of beer, the group was able to stick to the budget. Had the liquor laws not been changed it would have been impossible for a kitchen to have been built in the old barber shop they were renting, and the budget would have had to have been at least doubled. This grungy, speakeasy bar vibe took hold of the youth of Melbourne. It felt anti-establishment and who wouldn’t want to buy a beer right off the street? This began the laneway culture.
The very popular and crowded Degraves Street, the one with all the fancy restaurants
Laneway after Laneway became home to the newest spot, with many restaurants taking advantage of cheap rent. It was a cheap, low risk way to try something new. If Meyers Place Bar had failed, the group would have lost only $25,000, compared to potentially $50,000 or more. Small little restaurants created by incredible chefs that may not have had the capital for a full traditional restaurant were able to blossom. Degraves Street, Flinders Lane and Hardware Lane offer some high-end dining options, with prices to match but it is still very possible to find hidden gems. I stumbled upon a Japanese restaurant named Osaka Bench that was in a storefront too small for the flavour that they were able to output. The five patrons inside the restaurant were pretty much in each other's laps but what I was tasting had transported me to a Michelin star restaurant in the nicest part of Tokyo. It was dirt cheap too, cheapest date I have ever taken my partner on.
There was originally no slash in the AC/DC Lane sign due to existing street naming conventions.
Melbourne doesn’t only want their laneways packed full of food and drinks; we need art. Street art courses through the veins of Melbourne. Head down any laneway, and you’re bound to see stencil art or two, graffiti in every spare space. The city has embraced it fully, with Hosier Lane opening as a street gallery in 1993 and ACDC Lane doing the same in 2004. While street art is not technically legal here, it is very much welcomed. Coming from Brisbane, I had never seen graffiti taking place in the flesh; that happens at night when I am sleeping. Not in my Melbourne. The first time I walked down Hosier Lane, there were artists all over making their mark. The fact that something technically illegal can become a tourist destination fills me with so much excitement. To ensure this culture is preserved, a new project called Flash Forward has started. The project team has selected 40 laneways across the CBD that need a little spice to act as the canvas for both audio and visual artists. The project is intended to create a network of connected laneways in a citywide exhibition of local talent, supported by both the City of Melbourne and the Victorian Government. I love seeing government organizations supporting our artistic expression!
In tracing the journey from neglected alleyways to vibrant cultural epicentres, Melbourne's laneways stand as a testament to the city's ingenuity and resilience. The City of Melbourne has done an amazing job at allowing Laneway usage to be normalised by helping to develop these once, slightly useless laneways into tourist destinations and even homes. Melbourne's laneways beckon us to explore, to discover, and to celebrate the spirit of innovation that defines our city. In embracing and preserving this unique aspect of our cultural heritage, we not only honour our past but also pave the way for a future enriched by creativity, connection, and possibility.
