October 2025
This photo from 1984 popped up Facebook recently – it’s the South Yarra Arms Hotel, which once stood on the corner of Chapel Street and Toorak Road, and gathered lots of comments from people who fondly remember it from the 70s and 80s as a popular pub with live bands and a disco.
It was demolished in c1993, and I recall thinking it was a pity, because I already liked interwar Tudor Revival, and the replacement, a flagship store for Country Road, was pretty bland.
But looking closely it wasn’t a great example of the style, with simple half-timbering, and oddly inset rectangular windows, not as picturesque as other examples. Can’t find out too much, but it seems to have been the result of a renovation in 1941 by RH McIntyre of a pub that from the one older pic was one of those late Edwardian ones, complete with dome. It had been a pub since at least the 1860s, known as the New Bridge Hotel, kept that name right up to the 1960s I think.
Storey of Melbourne 