A short history of Swan Street

A road before there was much of a town

Swan Street was set aside as a road reserve in 1837, in the same first rush of surveying that laid out Melbourne itself. For its first decade or so it stayed quiet. Then gold was found in Victoria, Melbourne boomed, and the street grew with it. By 1857 Swan Street was already a main thoroughfare, its traders including butchers, drapers, fruiterers, tailors, shoemakers, hairdressers and hoteliers, with the thickest cluster of buildings around the Church Street corner, roughly where the strip's centre of gravity still sits today.

The railway arrives

The station at the street's western end opened on 8 February 1859, and for a while it was actually named Swan Street station, before taking the Richmond name in 1867. The railway set the street's rhythm for the next century and a half: crowds arriving and leaving, pubs and shops clustering near the platforms, and later, tens of thousands of football fans pouring through on their way to the MCG. The route 70 tram still rolls down the middle of the street to this day.

Pubs on every corner

The strip's oldest institutions are its hotels. The Precinct has traded opposite the station since 1852. The Corner Hotel was first licensed in 1871 to David and Jane McCormick, thriving on railway trade. The Central Club and the Rising Sun both date to the same era, and the butcher's shop at 218 Swan St, today Bertie's, has been a butcher since 1870.

The Corner earned its legend later. It started hosting daytime jazz in the 1940s, was demolished and rebuilt in 1966 when the railway lines expanded, and in the 1970s and 80s became one of Australia's defining live music rooms, hosting the likes of Midnight Oil, Men at Work and Paul Kelly. In 1988, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones played here unannounced under the name The Brothers Of Sodom, a night that has passed into Melbourne pub folklore.

The clock tower

You can't tell the street's story without Dimmeys. The department store at 140-160 Swan Street was built in stages from 1907 by architects H W & F B Tompkins, and its landmark clock tower, added with the 1910 extension, was topped with a globe of red glass panels lit from inside, visible for miles across the flat inner suburbs. Generations of Melburnians gave directions by it. The store is gone, but the tower still owns the skyline above the strip.

Waves of arrival

Like all of Richmond, Swan Street was remade by migration. Greek families arrived in force after the Second World War and made the street a centre of Greek Melbourne: Salona has been run by the same family since 1969, Agapi has served Greek food since the same year, and souvlaki joints still anchor the late-night end of the strip. Vietnamese Melbourne settled thickest along Victoria Street to the north, but its influence reached Swan Street too, from long-running banh mi bakeries to the modern Vietnamese rooms that now bookend the station.

The eating street

The last two decades turned a working shopping strip into one of Melbourne's great food streets. Old shopfronts became wine bars, pasta bars, izakayas and taquerias; heritage corners like Balls Corner, once one of Melbourne's first department stores, poured cocktails; a former car park by the station became an open-air bar. The names change fast, which is partly why this site exists, but the pattern is old: Swan Street has been feeding and watering people on their way somewhere else since the 1850s.

This guide keeps track of every venue currently trading on the street.Start exploring here.