Melbourne city is slowly coming back to life after months of lockdowns, on and off. Walking the streets of the CBD, I see people around, a tenuous return to the streets.
As you walk west along Collins Street, you pass some of Melbourne’s best nineteenth-century mercantile buildings – the Block Arcade (1893), the former Melbourne Stock Exchange (1891), the former ES&A “Gothic” Bank (1887) and, across the intersection of Collins and Queen streets, the former National Mutual Life Association building (1893). These gothic and classical buildings are remnants of “Marvellous Melbourne” and the land boom that fuelled it. They are street buildings with a rich interplay of windows, doorways and ornamentation proudly exhibiting the commerce of the time.
You need to walk down William Street to get a sense of the next great boom and the legacy of twentieth-century commerce: Yuncken Freeman’s AMP Square (1969),
