January 2026

Not much to look at, but this little cream brick box in Hotham Street, East St Kilda is the earliest remaining intact Modernist church in Victoria.

St Margaret’s Presbyterian was completed in May 1954, and up till about then churches were still being built with clearly Gothic form and details. The modernist arch roofed St Johns Mitcham was built the year before, but it’s long gone, and St Marks Lutheran in East Melbourne also 1953 has been very altered (last 2 pics), so this is the earliest. This one is very simple, a low pitched gable roof, with attached cross and steel propped porch, it almost doesn’t look like a church. Inside there’s two rows of steel posts creating the idea of side aisles, and there a stained glass window, so it feels a bit more churchy.

The idea of a low pitched roofed box may have come direct from the 1952 Swiss Reformed Church (pic 10), which the architect K Murray Foster might have seen on his European trip 6 months before designing this. The format of a low pitched roof brick box was then repeated many times across Victoria and beyond, sometimes with a bigger cross motif, bell tower, feature window etc.

Unlike many other churches this one doesnt seem to have been altered at all, and whats more it’s one of the relatively few ‘continuing’ Presbyterian churches, for those that didn’t want to join up with the Uniting Church in 1977.

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