Return to “Funky Fitzroy”

Fitzroy is a suburb of Melbourne, just 3 km north east of the Central Business District. Like Prahran, it’s a very lively, trendy “hipster” area. I’d enjoyed exploring the district during my previous visit to Melbourne in 2014 so we decided to go and take another look around.

The district was created in 1839 and rapidly grew as a working class suburb during the 19th century. Consequently there are a large number of very typical Australian Victorian terraced houses. During the 20th Century it became populated with immigrants from many different countries. These days the area has been gentrified and has become popular with trendy middle class “hipsters”. The character of the area reflects all of these.

There are a large number of well preserved Australian style Victorian era working class terraced houses. They’re smaller and more compact than those I saw in the more prosperous region to the east of the city centre, but still have verandas and balconies decorated with intricate ironwork and with corrugated iron roofs.

Many of the houses and buildings have been decorated by street artists

and there’s plenty of great street art all around the are

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More artistic decoration of street furniture

There’s even an urban garden centre

Some interesting modern buildings – a sign of gentrification

and the old, neo Classical Town Hall, quite different from other buildings in the area