News / Environment
Rain fails to dampen park’s opening
New Frith Street park has been built on a former industrial site
Mark Phillips
IT was more than a year late and 60% over budget, but Brunswick’s newest park has finally opened to the public.
And nothing was going to rain on the parade at the official opening on Saturday morning of the new Frith Street park – especially not a burst of wintry wet weather.
The open space, which will soon be formally named Yubup Park for the Woi-wurrung word for ‘parrakeet’, occupies most of a former industrial block behind the Duke of Edinburgh hotel car park.
The 2700 square metres site was once home to the head office of clothing company Fletcher Jones and to an industrial foundry.
Features of the old buildings have been retained, including the moderne façade of the Fletcher Jones offices, behind which has been constructed a multi-use space which may end up housing a café.
The new park is dominated by a large, gently sloping grassy area on its northern side. It also has a children’s rock climbing wall, a basketball half court, outdoor table tennis, a sheltered barbecue and picnic area, garden beds and plenty of bench seating, and public toilets.
It is the latest to be delivered under Merri-bek Council’s A Park Close to Home strategy, which aims to increase the amount of local space close to housing around the city.
Previous projects have included Bulleke-bek Park, near Anstey railway station, and Garrong Park in Tinning Street. Work is underway on the new Michelle Guglielmo Park, which will be opposite the Brunswick Town Hall building at 260 Sydney Road.
Advertisement
The land in Frith Street was bought by the council in 2019 for $10.4 million and had an initial development budget of $5.2 million. Funding included a $1.3 million grant from the Victorian government and money raised from contributions property developers are required to make towards open space.
The Frith Street park was originally due to open in the middle of last year, but was plagued by delays and extra costs from day one forcing council staff to ask several times for more funding for the project.
Engineering and construction work on the site began in June 2022 and has been painstakingly slow since then as unforeseen structural and contamination issues have been discovered. The most recent of these required the entire reconstruction of the original foundry’s brick wall on Lobb Street after it was found to be unsafe and at risk of collapse.
The final cost of the construction and design of the park was $8.3 million, well above its original $5.2 million budget.
Read more:
Park opening pushed back until mid-year
Pulford admitted that it had been touch and go whether the park would be completed in time for him to do the honours, given its tortured history.
Merri-bek Mayor Adam Pulford officially opened the park on Saturday as one of his final duties before the council goes into caretaker mode on Tuesday ahead of local government elections.
He said it had been a complex project with unique and unforeseen problems, but he was confident it would prove to be a valued and popular community asset into the future.
“Turning a factory into a park in Brunswick will come with challenges and things that we won’t necessarily know right at the start, which is why the costs have had to increase a little bit here,” he said.
“But I think it’s great to be have been able to turn a factory into a park, but still retain some of the history of the site. We had a lot of our migrant workers working out of this factory decades ago, and so I think it’s important that while we now have created a new public use for this site, we honour the history that’s right here and continue to tell that story.”
The A Park Close To Home strategy seeks to provide access to public open space within 500 metres of every home in Merri-bek, or within 300 metres in heavily built up areas like most of Brunswick.
Pulford said the council was constantly scouting for new infill sites that had potential to be turned into public parks.
“It’s by far one of our most loved programs at council, [we’re] really proud that we’ve created seven new parks in our community … Council’s considering whenever a property goes up for sale, if it’s in one of the low access zones, we may seek to acquire it and turn it into open space with community members.”
Support independent local journalism
We are an independent hyperlocal news organisation owned and run by the people in your community. With your support, we can continue to produce unique and valuable local journalism for Brunswick and the inner north of Melbourne.
