Reading a suburb by its verandas

Reference library · 1100 words

Melbourne's suburbs are legible from the footpath in a way that few cities allow, and the veranda is the clearest single index. Because the metropolis expanded outward in distinct bursts, each with its own building fashion and its own economics, the front of a house tends to date itself within about fifteen years. Once you can read the veranda you can read the suburb, and once you can read the suburb you understand something about who built it, who could afford it, and what happened to the city in the decade it went up.

All of this sits on the country of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people north of the Birrarung, the river now called the Yarra, and of the Boon Wurrung to the south and along the bay. The suburban grid was imposed on that country from 1837 onward through survey and sale, and the housing stock described below is the physical residue of that dispossession as much as it is a record of taste. It is worth holding both facts at once.

Cast iron and the boom

The classic inner Melbourne veranda is a single storey or two storey timber and iron structure carried on slender cast iron columns, with a lace frieze between the columns, brackets in the corners, and a balustrade above if there is a balcony. You will see it in dense runs through Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, North Melbourne, East Melbourne, Parkville, South Melbourne, Albert Park, Middle Park, Richmond, Prahran and Windsor. The roof is usually corrugated galvanised iron, often in the concave curve locals call a bullnose, and the whole assembly typically sits on a bluestone plinth cut from the basalt that underlies the western plains.

The dates matter. The gold rushes of the 1850s made Victoria rich and Melbourne populous, but the great outpouring of decorated iron came later, in the land boom of the 1880s, when the city advertised itself as Marvellous Melbourne and speculative builders threw up terrace rows on every subdivided paddock within reach of a cable tram. Ornament was cheap because it was standardised. Foundries cast columns, brackets and frieze panels in repeatable patterns, and a builder chose from a catalogue. The more panels and the deeper the frieze, the more money was in the street the year it was built.

Here a popular story deserves correction. It is often said that Melbourne's cast iron lace arrived as ballast in the holds of ships from Britain. Some ironwork was certainly imported, but a great deal of it was made here, in Victorian foundries, in patterns designed and sold locally, and the ballast tale is repeated far more confidently than the evidence supports. The lace on a Fitzroy terrace is more likely a local industrial product than a British souvenir.

Then the boom broke. The land bubble collapsed at the start of the 1890s and the banks with it, and building almost stopped. That crash is visible in the streets: you can walk a block of exuberant 1880s iron and step abruptly into a modest, plainer, thinner strip of housing from the years afterward, when nobody was paying for brackets.

Federation, the bungalow and the retreat of ornament

Building resumed in the years around Federation in 1901 with an entirely different vocabulary. The Federation or Edwardian house turns its back on cast iron. It is usually red brick with a terracotta tiled roof, a gable facing the street, roughcast render in the gable, and a veranda carried on turned timber posts with timber fretwork instead of iron. The colours are warmer and the plan is looser, because these houses were built on wider blocks further out. Look for them in Northcote, Thornbury, Ascot Vale, Moonee Ponds, Hawthorn East, Malvern and Elsternwick. A red brick veranda on a timber post, in a street of similar houses on generous frontages, tells you the electric tram or the railway reached that spot in roughly the first decade of the twentieth century.

The interwar Californian bungalow is different again and is perhaps the easiest of all to spot. The veranda becomes a deep porch tucked under the main roof, carried not on slender columns but on heavy squat piers, often tapered, often of clinker brick or roughcast render on a brick base. The roof is low pitched, the eaves are wide and the windows are grouped in bands. These are the houses of the 1920s and 1930s, and they blanket Camberwell, Glen Iris, Ivanhoe, Essendon, Coburg and Preston. The change from lace to pier is not merely stylistic. It reflects a shift from the terrace row built for rent to the detached family house bought on a mortgage, and a new idea that the front of the house should look solid and private rather than sociable and decorative.

After the Second World War the veranda largely disappears. The postwar cream brick veneer house of Reservoir, Broadmeadows, Glen Waverley and Springvale usually has a small entry porch and nothing more. Sun was to be enjoyed at the back, in the garden, not at the front, on display. When you cross that line while walking, you have crossed from a suburb built before 1940 to one built after it, and everything else about the street changes with it.

What was removed, and what was put back

The strips are not pristine. Through the middle of the twentieth century verandas were seen as dark, rickety and old fashioned, and thousands were simply taken off, leaving the flat scarred facade that renovators call a stripped front. Shopping strips lost their posted verandas as well, replaced by cantilevered awnings that no longer needed columns in the footpath. Worse, the Housing Commission of Victoria's slum reclamation programs demolished large areas of Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood and North Melbourne outright and replaced them with high rise estates, and the residents' associations that formed in the late 1960s to fight further clearance were among the first heritage campaigns in Australia to succeed.

What followed was gentrification, and with it a reinstatement industry: reproduction lace, new bullnose roofs, restored bluestone. Most inner suburbs are now covered by heritage overlays in the local planning scheme, and the more significant places are on the Victorian Heritage Register. So a veranda you are looking at may be original, may be a careful reconstruction, or may be a 1990s approximation with the frieze pattern subtly wrong. The tell is usually the ironwork itself. Old castings have soft, slightly uneven edges and a certain weight; new ones are crisper, lighter and repeat too perfectly. Learning that difference is the last step from reading the suburb to reading the house.

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