News / Planning
History group calls for council to reject apartment design
Cable engine house drove Brunswick’s trams for 50 years
Elisabeth Jackson and Mal Rowe at the rear of the building in Black Street.
Mark Phillips
AN important link to Melbourne’s early public transport history could be lost if a seven-level student apartment complex is allowed to be built above the former cable tram engine house in Brunswick Road, according to heritage advocates.
Brunswick Community History Group and the Melbourne Tramways Museum are both urging Merri-bek Council to reject the application by Bensons Property Group to gut the building so it can develop apartments behind the facade.
The engine house operated from 1887 until 1936 and played a key role in the tram route that ran from Elizabeth Street in the CBD along Sydney Road to Coburg.
The developer first applied to the council in May last year for a planning permit in May last year for a nine-storey apartment building valued at $18 million at 253-263 Brunswick Road. It has since reduced it to seven storeys.
It has also applied to Heritage Victoria for permission to make changes to the site, which is on the Victorian Heritage Register.
The developer intends to build the apartments behind the walls of the cable engine house, which would be stripped back to its original plain brick facade. The apartment building would be rendered with a similar rust colour.
The site is on the corner of Black Street, between the Wild Geese Hotel (formerly the Sarah Sands Hotel) and the Upfield railway line.
For half a century, the building housed large steam-driven machinery that that drove the underground cables on Melbourne’s longest tram route running 9.6km from Flinders Street to Moreland Road and back.
Coal-powered steam engines drove large wheels which pulled underground cables to move the trams. A tall chimney stood above the steam engine.
In 1925, an electrical sub-station was installed in part of the building to power the West Brunswick tram route. That sub-station is still in use today for the Sydney Road tram service.
Mal Rowe, a member of the Melbourne Tram Museum, said it was the second last of Melbourne tram network’s 17 cable engine houses to be decommissioned when what is now the #19 tram route was full electrified a few years before World War Two.
It was sold to private owners and has had various uses over the past 90 years including as a semi-trailer factory and most recently as a tyre service business, but the original walls and interior layout of the building have been retained.
The building was listed on the Victorian Heritage Register in 2020 and is considered to be of historical and archaeological significance.
Its Heritage Register citation says that despite its plain design it is “a rare and relatively intact surviving element of Melbourne’s cable tram system” and “is significant for its potential to contain significant nineteenth century archaeological remains and artefacts relating to the cable tram system”.
Rowe said some of the infrastructure that ran the cable trams is still intact under the floor of the building.
“They [the developers] have done some excavations as part of the huge volume of documentation they put up to get the heritage listing changed … [and] in one place, they’ve dug up a section of the floor, and they’ve revealed the foundations for part of the old driving mechanism.
“The cables came out sort of diagonally, out in Black Street, and then down Brunswick Road, and they would have come out to this intersection here [at Sydney Road].
“So underneath the road there’ll be a huge pit three metres, four metres deep where they had huge wheels to take the cable around the corner. It’ll be full of all sorts of rubbish that they filled it in with but it’ll still be there.”
Brunswick Community History Group president Elisabeth Jackson said the building was an important site at the entrance to Brunswick alongside the renovated Wild Geese Hotel.
Jackson said the group was not trying to totally stop the develpment, but the current plans to retain the facade but build behind it were unacceptable.
She said the Sarah Sands Hotel was a good example of development that was sensitive to heritage.
“It’s an awful example of facadism because they’re going to keep the facade and restore it, which is good … but directly behind it, there’s a multi-storey building right up against it.
“So what I would like is for that to be moved back so that there’s a gap between the facade and the tower.”
Jackson said it could take 12 months for Heritage Victoria to rule about the development and in the meantime Merri-bek Council should not make an decision about the planning permit.
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