Dust, decay and a multimillion-dollar bill: The battle to save Melbourne’s forgotten town halls
Once-grand inner-Melbourne town halls have been marooned in history and largely left to rot for almost three decades, but there is hope that new life awaits them.
Dust settles in the arched corridor of an inner-city town hall, dark except for fingers of grey light stretching along the carpet. The air is musty, still. Quiet.
Except for the booming voice of Stephen Jolly, who is emphatically slapping a swipe card against a reader. “In here is the ballroom. It’s gigantic,” he says. The card reader beside the frosted glass door beeps disapprovingly.
Jolly pulls his phone out of his pocket, punching in a number before he holds it to his ear. “I told him ages ago that I was coming here today,” the Yarra mayor says, mildly annoyed.
We’re inside the palatial Fitzroy Town Hall in Melbourne’s inner north, a relic of the city’s Victorian-era past, one which has sat largely empty since Liberal premier Jeff Kennett ordered statewide council amalgamations in the 1990s.
The City of Yarra’s council meetings resumed here in 2025 after a years-long hiatus, but – like many of Melbourne’s grand town halls – the height of its civil life is marooned in history. It may be time to reclaim it.
“If I wanted to write something, really concentrate on something, I would come here,” Jolly says. “[But] it’d be like coming to a morgue.
“Inner-city land is so expensive, and we have this here, and it’s just not fully utilised. I just hate seeing waste.”
Tea cups bearing the old City of Fitzroy emblem are stacked in a disused councillors’ room, left over from before it was consumed into the City of Yarra (along with Collingwood and Richmond). The walls of other rooms upstairs are coated in great swaths of dust, and paint is stripped where electrical wiring was torn out and replaced.
Curtains printed with pictures of books hang on ornate shelves in the reading room where hardbacks used to be. The Fitzroy Legal Service, a couple of NGOs and the local library are here, but the civil servants are long gone, leaving much of the building desolate (its high ceilings, while striking, make it difficult to heat and cool).
A woman arrives to let us into the ballroom, swinging open the frosted glass doors to reveal a cavernous, classical space fitted with bell flower chandeliers and balcony seating.
If Jolly had his way, this building would be humming again. Newer council offices in Richmond (“a white elephant”) would be sold off, and staff would work across the municipality’s three town halls, with Fitzroy upgraded to accommodate them.
Melbourne could restore many of its under-used and dilapidated town halls back to their former glory. But it would take time, money, forethought – and a good dose of imagination.
It was an average Thursday, springti
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