Little Lonsdale St L - R from Spring st.
Elms Family Hotel 1925, Knight Frank Storage c 1920’s, Alexander Lugton Blacksmith c 1868, Gloria Knitting and Underwear Mills c 1900-20’s Oddfellows Hotel 1853
Remnants of the once vast Little Lon community of slum houses, brothels, drug dens, cottage industries and Melbourne’s earliest multi-cultural melting pot.
A diverse collection of lanes and buildings were compulsorily acquired and demolished by the Commonwealth government from the 1950’s onwards for high rise office blocks, leaving only scattered streetscapes and archaeological sites below the ground as reminders of the once densely populated and scandalised community in the heart of the city.
More on Little Lon in the next few posts.
below, “Respectable Melbourne basks in sunlight, while slumdwellers dwell in poverty and darkness” pro slum-clearance propaganda from the mid 20th century- courtesy of Museum Victoria.
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