My new suburb is Bentleigh. It’s about 5 minutes further out of the city than my old stomping grounds of Glen Huntly or Carnegie, and certainly further into suburbia.
It’s still in zone 1. That was a requirement when house-hunting. Mind you it’s the last station in zone 1. I’m pretty close to the station, but if for some reason I wanted to catch the bus part of the way, I’d be stung for an extra zone 2 fare.
It’s very close to the Centre Road shops, with its two supermarkets, Glicks Bagels outlet, library, post office and banks. There’s even a bank of my new flavour, St George, who opened their new branch there this week. (Maybe having another Gold customer in the area convinced them to do it?)
Apparently the Centre Road shopping centre was ranked the 9th best in Melbourne in 1994. It’s still pretty good, and so far I’m enjoying living there, though Bentleigh didn’t rank highly in the Age’s recent suburb liveability survey.
This web page briefly documents how the suburb was created, but seems to mostly talk about how to escape to other places. Hmmm. There’s more history here. The name comes from Sir Thomas Bent, once premier of Victoria (and, I understand, somewhat bent himself).
My street is quiet. It’s not a dead-end, but it leads to nowhere. I’ve already had friendly greetings from several of the neighbours.
My sister is doing some marketing work for Bentleigh. So far my favourite rejected slogans are “There’s plently in Bentleigh” and “Bentleigh — it’s better than Oakleigh.”
5 replies on “My new suburb”
I have been very familiar with Centre Road since I was a kid. I can’t believe how congested it is now. For a while it was a bit of desolate strip, but it was very easy to drive along. Not so now. It would be in the running for one of the most council restricted streets in Melbourne. A good thing for local shops for local people I guess.
Now heres the big question. Do you drive to the station, or walk? Methinks walking would be better.
Are you part-way between Bentleigh and Patterson stations, or the other direction? If so, do you use Patterson (in Zone 2) sometimes?
Walk, definitely; it’s only ten minutes, and would be more trouble to find a park. I’m more-or-less directly east of Bentleigh, so I’d never use Patterson.
as for a slogan, how about:
“Bentleigh, mmmm Zone 1 (just)”
Welcome to Bentleigh. I’ve lived in East Bentleigh for 8 years and for 10 years in East Brighton (doing my shopping in Centre Road) before that. It’s a lovely place to live.