8 January 2024

😡 yet more facadism, (photo @jfnolen) and somewhere once very nice. The Society restaurant at the top of Bourke Street is now just two walls, as is the 1901 shop next door. The buildings were sold in 2017, and a permit to do this was granted in 2019 before the new more strict heritage guidelines against facadism were passed, dammit. It’s going to be a very large French restaurant called Batard developed by Chris Lucas.

It was originally shops and residences above, built in 1901, and designed in a charming florid Edwardian style by William Salway. It was an L shaped site with outbuildings abutting Then in 1932 The Italian Society restaurant moved in, combining the two shops. It was run by the Codognotto family until 1984, who then kept the building, while others ran the cafe. I went there for my graduation dinner in 1987, very nice, pretty sure it was still called the Society. The angled interior shot I took shows circular indirect light fittings probably from 1932, and online images of upstairs showed one room had more, and another possibly had original Edwardian cornices fireplace etc.

The permit was amended last September when they asked to demolish and rebuild the parapets chimneys, because it was too hard to prop them up with nothing underneath. That went to council and deputy mayor Nic Reece said theyd have to do it ‘brick by brick’ (how else ?) and also that the restaurant was a ‘massive investment’. The new shopfronts are in boring and clashy black, like everything these days.

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