Melbourne & Australian Architecture Topics

The former City of Melbourne Electric Lighting Station, commonly referred to as the Lonsdale St Power Station, is located in the Melbourne CBD in the area bounded by Lonsdale St, Spencer St, Lt Bourke St and Pender Alley.

The site provided Melbourne's first self-generated electric power, and operated continuously as a power station between 1892 and 1982. The current buildings date from the 1920s onwards. The prominent rendered brick building and chimney on Lonsdale St were built in 1953. Some of the buildings are contaminated with asbestos and polychlorinated biphenyls.

In 1982 the power station ceased operation except for a substation on the Lt Bourke St side. The building between Rose and Pender Alleys is used as a cleaning depot by the City of Melbourne. During the 1990s one of the buildings was leased for use as a theatre venue.

The site was sold by Melbourne City Council to Sydney developer Malcolm Sharpe for $4 million in 2002. Sharpe's Key Securities Investment Group later went into liquidation.

In 2003 a protester was arrested for painting the "No jobs on a dead planet" slogan on the chimney; the other slogans were already present at this time.

In October 2004, 13 year-old Emma Oates sustained head injuries in a fall inside one of the buildings and died days later. After a fire in July 2005, sections of the site's perimeter were secured with razor wire.

In May 2006 the site was sold for $7.6 million to Russian developers Vladimir Stepanov, Dmitri Bril and Oleg Mogilnitskiy. Since then, Guilfoyle Wreckers and Australian Technical Services have begun decontamination and demolition work on the site. Details of the site's redevelopment are not publicly available at the time of writing.

The power station is a significant part of Melbourne's history, and as such historical records should be made before it is demolished. Members of this forum can make a contribution to future Melbourne historians by adding photographs and information to this thread.

Some recent photographs by velco and myself...























More photos are available at the Lonsdale St Power Station Flickr group.

EXCELLENT thread mugley
Not a big fan of this collection of buildings myself, but at the same time do not underestimate the historical importance of the site.
I'll try to contribute to this thread however I can.

Thanks TC - good to have the resources of the fabled Librarium Collectorum on board

Aerial view from Google Maps

Some of the less-obvious structures on the site...

Small brick building on Lt Bourke St. You can see the roof of this to the lower right of the chimney opening on the Google map:



Corner of Lonsdale St and Rose Alley (second alleyway to the right of the chimney on the map). Note the "skybridges" connecting the main building to the cleaning depot (brick building on the left):



Brick building on Spencer St (the double tin roofs on the left of the map):

further selection of fragments and bits that will no longer be