Block Arcade, Melbourne — covered passageway
jwbenwell · CC BY-SA 2.0

Block Arcade, Melbourne

Block Arcade

  • 1 min read
  • 37.816° S 144.964° E

Interesting facts

  • When it was laid, its floor of tiles imported from Europe was reported as the largest area of mosaic yet put down anywhere in Australia.
  • The arcade was the project of the financier and land-boom speculator Benjamin Fink, who had begun buying up the site by 1888.
  • On Friday 13 September 1889 a huge fire gutted Georges Emporium, the store then on the site, and pushed Fink's arcade scheme forward.
  • The land beneath it was first sold at Melbourne's very first land auction, held on 1 June 1837.
  • The painted ceiling of the former Singer shop is the work of Phillip Goatcher, a scenic artist known for painting theatre backdrops.
  • The Collins Street wing was finished first, in early 1892, and the Elizabeth Street wing followed a year later.
  • The Collins and Elizabeth Street façades are in an exuberant Victorian Mannerist style, thick with stucco ornament.
  • The side passage now called Block Place was originally known as Carpenters Lane.
  • Sold for 15 million Australian dollars in 1986, the arcade passed to its bank after the property crash and was auctioned again in 1993, exactly a century after it opened.

Why it is worth it

The Block Arcade is Melbourne's most ornate Victorian shopping gallery, built between 1891 and 1893 at 282 Collins Street to designs by the architects Twentyman & Askew. It was modelled on the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan,, and it brought a piece of European arcade architecture to the heart of the Australian city. Its name recalls "doing the Block", the fashionable promenade along Collins Street between Elizabeth and Swanston streets that was already established by the late 1870s.

The arcade is L-shaped, turning from Collins Street towards Elizabeth Street around an octagonal rotunda at the corner. Its great pleasure is the detail: mosaic tile floors in intricate patterns, a glass canopy carried on cast and wrought iron, and tall, ornate timber shopfronts, all enclosed by six-storey facades. The whole interior feels closer to a nineteenth-century European capital than to the modern city outside.

For more than a century it was home to the Hopetoun Tea Rooms, opened in 1894 and in the arcade from 1907 until their move to Bourke Street in 2020. The former Singer sewing machine shop keeps a painted ceiling, and the arcade also housed Melbourne's first Kodak store. It was placed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 1974, and a side passage connects it to Block Place and on towards Little Collins Street, part of the city's network of lanes.

Getting there

The Block Arcade is at 282 Collins Street in the Melbourne CBD, with a second entrance on Elizabeth Street. The nearest airport by distance is Essendon Airport (MEB), about 11 km away. The Collins Street/Elizabeth Street tram stop is less than 100 metres from the entrance.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Australia 55The Most Beautiful Shopping Arcades and Passages 12The Most Beautiful Squares, Streets and Monuments 173

From the encyclopaedia

The Block Arcade is a historic shopping arcade in the central business district of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Constructed between 1891 and 1893, it is considered one of the late Victorian era's finest shopping arcades and ranks among Melbourne's most popular tourist attractions.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

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