19 September 2021

Having just read Judith Buckridge’s history of St Kilda Road ‘Grand Boulevard’, I wanted to see if I could work out what it actually looked like in its hey day, since there’s no postcards or film that show it clearly lined with mansions, which dome people still say they remember. So it was surprising (to me) learn that the big houses weren’t all 1880s boom mansions – in fact by 1896 there were only 59 houses (I’m including queens road), and many were more like large houses, and there were far more lots not built on (75), and some of the houses were on triple or double lots – so the street would have felt mostly open, trees and gardens, with scattered mansions, some set so far back maybe only glimpsed as you passed by in a cable tram.

Many of those now gone don’t seem have left photographic records; the photos that are on-line are mainly from the 1950s-70s, and focus on the grandest 19th century ones. Others were not that imposing, and many had been replaced by flats between the 20s-50s. Heritage listing didn’t happen until the early 1980s, and a few that were not very remarkable or already altered have been demolished since.

There’s 12 left, of which 8 are Victorian mansions, 3 Edwardian, and one built 1925. The colour plan at the end is a detail of an 1896 MMBW map. Yes it’s a great shame they’re all gone, but there was no such thing as heritage listing before 1974 – but then that should have saved the very first house, Armadale (pic 1), but didn’t, it was dem 1976, and most of all Koonwarra (1913), demolished in 1984.

The book shows that just as many houses were built after the 1890s as before, so they weren’t all Victorian mansion / towered things, many were 1920s bungalow or classic styles – I’ve only found a few images though. The first is from the book, ‘Aloha’, built c1920 at no. 481, and what’s now the Indonesian Consulate on Queens Road, built 1925, one of only two post-1900 houses left (out of about 60). These later houses filled up almost all of the vacant lots, and some were built on some of the triple lots that some of Victorian houses occupied (which were carefully built on the central lots, so clearly they thought they might sell the sides off !)

St Kilda Road went through so many phases, one melding into the next, such as many flats in the 30s replacing houses sometimes not even 20 years old. But the 1920s must have been ‘peak’, when the trees were grown, and it was indeed lined with mansions and big houses.

But by then many older houses had already become guest houses or flats, and some purpose built flats were already appearing too, eg Coronado Guest House, just before the Commercial Rd corner, built 1927. First aerial pic is c1925, looking south from Toorak Road, you can see lots of gardens, and the second early 1930s, showing big houses, only some Victorian.

So I’ve sketched out maps of the road in 1896 and 1922, showing how sparse it was in the first, then fully built out 28 years later. The red blocks are houses and buildings that survive.

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