Why the CBD grid still guides how you walk

Reference library · 1100 words

Melbourne is an easy city to be lost in for about ten minutes and almost impossible to be lost in after that. The reason is a rectangle of streets surveyed in 1837 and never seriously departed from. Once you hold the order of the streets in your head, you can place yourself anywhere in the centre from a single street sign, work out roughly how far you are from a station, and know which way the trams will be running. Almost nothing else about getting around Melbourne is that simple.

The order runs like a spine. Starting at the river and walking away from it: Flinders Street, Flinders Lane, Collins Street, Little Collins Street, Bourke Street, Little Bourke Street, Lonsdale Street, Little Lonsdale Street, La Trobe Street. The pattern of a wide street followed by a narrow one is completely regular, which means that if you are on a narrow street you already know the two wide streets on either side of you. Crossing them, running from the western edge to the eastern: Spencer, King, William, Queen, Elizabeth, Swanston, Russell, Exhibition and Spring. The main streets are about thirty metres wide, the little streets about ten, and each city block is around two hundred metres square.

That symmetry conceals a slope. The grid is not flat, and Melburnians navigate by gradient as much as by name. The land rises from Flinders Street away from the water, and rises again towards Spring Street at what was called Eastern Hill, where Parliament House and St Patrick's Cathedral sit. There was once a corresponding rise at the western end, Batman's Hill, which was cut away in the nineteenth century to make room for the railway yards that became Southern Cross Station. Elizabeth Street runs along the lowest line through the middle of the grid, following the course of an old watercourse, and it still floods in a serious downpour. If you are ever unsure which way the river is, walk downhill.

The little streets do the real work

The narrow streets were not built as amenities. Governor Bourke insisted on rear access lanes through the middle of each block in 1837 so that carts could reach the back of warehouses, and Robert Hoddle inserted them against his own judgement. For a century they carried deliveries, workshops, night soil and rubbish. Today they carry pedestrians, and they are the single biggest reason walking the city feels different from walking a comparable grid in North America.

Because a block is only about two hundred metres deep and has a street through the middle of it, a walker in central Melbourne is never more than a hundred metres from a route parallel to the one they are on. That doubles the effective density of the network without doubling the traffic, and it means you can cut a diagonal through the city in a series of short steps rather than being funnelled onto the main roads. Add the arcades, notably the Block Arcade and the Royal Arcade between Bourke Street and Little Collins Street, and the narrow lanes that were never given street status at all, and the centre becomes a permeable thing rather than a set of corridors.

It is worth being clear that this is a recent way of using the space. Melbourne's centre emptied out after office hours for most of the twentieth century. The lanes filled with people only after residential conversion of old warehouses and offices from the 1990s, and after a licensing review reported in 1988 and led to reforms that made small venues viable. The pedestrian city is about thirty years old, laid over a plan that is nearly two hundred.

Trams, hook turns and the free zone

The other thing the grid governs is the tram network. Melbourne runs the largest urban tram system in operation anywhere, with more than twenty numbered routes, around two hundred and fifty kilometres of double track and stops roughly every three hundred to six hundred metres. Trams run down the centre of the wide streets and never down the little ones, which is another reason the wide and narrow alternation is useful: if you want a tram, walk to a wide street.

This is also where the city's most famous traffic rule comes from. At a number of intersections in the centre, a car turning right must pull to the far left, wait, and complete the turn when the lights change. The hook turn exists because turning from the centre lane would put cars across the tram tracks. Two corrections are due here. The hook turn is not a Melbourne invention or a local eccentricity: it was the standard right turn across Victoria until the state phased it out in 1954, and central Melbourne kept it precisely to keep the middle of the road clear for trams. And it is not unique to Melbourne, since hook turns for cyclists are used in a number of cities. What is unusual is requiring it of cars in a capital city centre.

The Free Tram Zone, which covers the grid, Docklands and the Queen Victoria Market, is also frequently described as a longstanding civic tradition. It is not. It began in 2015. Outside the zone you must touch on with a card, and the boundaries catch a lot of visitors, because a tram that is free at Spring Street is not free two stops further east.

Anchors, and where the grid breaks

The grid gives you a small number of unmissable anchors. Flinders Street Station sits at the southern edge where Swanston Street meets the river, and the steps under its row of clocks remain the city's default meeting point. Southern Cross Station holds the western end at Spencer Street. Three underground stations, Flagstaff, Melbourne Central and Parliament, sit under the northern and eastern edges on the City Loop, which means every corner of the rectangle is within a few minutes of a train. Queen Victoria Market sits just outside the north western corner, trading most days but closed Mondays and Wednesdays.

Where the grid stops, the clarity stops with it. Beyond La Trobe Street and Spring Street the streets reorient, follow old property boundaries and creek lines, and the compass becomes genuinely useful again. St Kilda Road runs south from Princes Bridge on a line Hoddle reserved, and Royal Parade runs north through Parkville on another, but between them the inner suburbs are a collection of separate nineteenth century subdivisions that were never designed to meet neatly. Melbourne's famous legibility is a property of about two square kilometres, and everyone here knows where it ends.

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