Description

Join David Helms, heritage advisor at the City of Port Phillip for a tour of Clarendon Street’s heritage architecture and the Emerald Hill Estate.

Largely formed during Melbourne’s 1880s building boom on the back of the Gold Rush and subsequent rapid development of Melbourne as a city, Clarendon Street is studded with buildings created by some of Melbourne’s most prominent 19the century architects. Emerald Hill (as it was formerly known) was made a municipality in 1855 – the first outside central Melbourne and the City of Geelong.

The Emerald Hill Estate is situated on a 10-acre block formerly owned by the Melbourne Protestant Orphan Asylum and bounded by Clarendon, Park, Cecil and Dorcas streets.

The estate is historically and socially important for its extraordinary development as a leasehold rather than freehold precinct. This is a direct manifestation of its associations with the Melbourne Protestant Orphan Asylum who vacated the site in 1877 but insisted on this form of development, which in effect ensured the survival of this unique and homogeneous precinct.

The commercial buildings collectively represent an extraordinary example of an 1880s shopping precinct with a high degree of intactness unmatched in extent anywhere else in Victoria and is architecturally important as an extraordinary example of municipal planning during the 1880s boom.

The Emerald Hill Estate was listed on the Victorian Heritage Register in August 1982.

What's On

Take a guided tour with David Helms, heritage advisor at the City of Port Phillip for a tour of Clarendon Street’s heritage architecture and the Emerald Hill Estate. Glean insight into 19th century architects, architectural styles and a significant Victorian heritage conservation program.

There are three guided tours in this program. Visit the council website for more information and up-to-date program details.
https://www.portphillip.vic.gov.au/explore-the-city/history-and-heritage