Precinct 5: Doing the Block

Young women called at Allan’s music store to select their sheet music. Men-about-town lunched at Gunsler’s restaurant, while their wives sought the latest novels at Mr Mullen’s bookshop. In crowded upper rooms, milliners and dressmakers laboured to adorn the beautiful people on the street.

This was ‘The Block’, the city’s most fashionable shopping street. ‘Doing the Block’ — walking up and down this section of Collins Street in the late afternoon or on Saturday morning — was a favourite pastime between 1870 and the First World War (1914-18). The Block is famous for its arcades, modelled on those of London and Milan. By increasing the number of shopfronts they increased landlords’ returns while offering lady shoppers refuge from the dust, heat and noise of the street.

Detour from Collins Street through Block Arcade and Block Place, pass Royal Arcade and return to Collins Street via Howey Place and Capitol Arcade.

Stop 10
Elizabeth Street was once the boundary between two Melbournes. Before it became a street it was a creek and in colonial times heavy rains could suddenly turn it into a river, drowning grown men in its deep gutters. It was also the main exit from Melbourne to the goldfields along Mt Alexander Road, and an entry to Flinders Street Station at its southern end. It was a social boundary, marking off the business end of town from the retail centre.

Stop 11
The grandest arcade
Block Arcade (1892-3), designed by David Askew for the landboomer Benjamin Fink, was the grandest arcade of all. Don't miss the 1907 ceiling murals in Chelsea Design, formerly the Singer Sewing Shop, at the entrance to the arcade or the ‘little man’ who taps on the window of Haigh’s Chocolate Shop. The intricate mosaic floor of the arcade is the largest in Australia.

Stop 11
Tea and gentility
Exhibitions of women’s handcrafts were one of the features of the international exhibitions of 1880 and 1888. Lady Hopetoun, haughty wife of the popular Victorian governor Lord Hopetoun, founded a Victorian Ladies’ Work Association which established tearooms at number 6 Block Arcade in 1893. The Association disbanded in 1907 but the tearooms named after its founder have survived in their original location to this day.

Stop 12
Airy pleasure domes
Every arcade had its special attractions. Royal Arcade (1869) has been guarded since 1892 by the legendary giants, Gog and Magog, who, inside this southern entrance, strike the hour in time with jeweller Thomas Gaunt’s great clock.

Stop 13
Howey Place once housed part of E.W. Cole’s famous Book Arcade. With over three million books along its galleries, as well as a fernery, tearoom and monkey house, it became a Melbourne institution.