Elvera

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Lygon Street is one of Australia’s greatest and most harmonious melting pots. While the Italian story is the one most often told, Lygon Street has also made room for Jewish, Greek, Lebanese, Spanish, Chinese, Indian, German, Thai, Jamaican and Malaysian immigrants. It is a street that gives multiculturalism a good name. Everybody who has visited, worked, partied or lived in Melbourne inner north feels as if they own a part of Lygon Street. It is a unique place with a remarkable history that deserves to be remembered beyond the short-term memory clichés. It is a street with a future potentially as fascinating as it’s past.

Lygon Street makes a great argument for the importance of solid foundations. In the century and a half since it first appeared on the maps of Melbourne, Lygon Street has experienced the full gamut of economic, social and demographic boom and bust. But still it has kept functioning, not just as a major artery of commercial activity but as a generous force, capable of gathering life, energy and a sense of place to the inner-city suburb through which it runs.

The impressive bluestone building sitting at the corner of Lygon and Victoria Streets is the oldest continuously occupied trade union headquarters in the world. From the time it was laid out across bush land to the north of the Melbourne city grid, Lygon Street has been a melting pot. The people who lived, worked and owned business on the street came from many different ethnic backgrounds and economic circumstances.