Arcade Games

Time Travelling On Melbourne’s Historic Retail Trail.

- Sonal Shah

Melbourne feels less like a small city than a miniaturized big one. Roughly the size of Delhi’s old walled city, its central business district is compact enough to survey on foot in a few hours. Its regular grid, buildings in diverse architectural styles, and vibrant summer streets bristle with reasons why Australia’s good-time capital constantly tops global “liveability” lists. They also provide clues about its economic booms, beginning with the gold rush of the 1850s.

Melbourne’s historic core is the “Hoddle Grid” street system, laid out in 1837 and named for its planner. Here, east-west streets intersect perpendicularly with small laneways, which originally provided service access to the buildings of each block. Since the 1990s, these have been redeveloped as open-air eating and shopping areas. With distractions on every corner, it’s helpful to use the city’s enclosed arcades to orient oneself.

The critic Walter Benjamin deemed arcades “the most important architecture of the 19th century” in his massive, unfinished study of them. Melbourne once had over a dozen of these 19th- and 20th-century structures—somewhere between shopping mall and souk—inspired by their forebears in London, Paris, and Milan. Strolling through a handful of Melbourne’s surviving arcades, I glimpse aspects of the history of this colonial outpost, from the 1860s to the 1960s.

GOLD AND OLD