One of the great things about Melbourne’s CBD (the Hoddle Grid) is that it’s so easily navigable. There are lots of parallel streets and laneways, so when walking around it’s pretty easy to take an alternative route, and still not get lost. You can use this to avoid Chuggers. Charity Muggers are notorious for getting ... [More]
Category: Melbourne
Melbourne stuff
You might have seen media coverage (Age / Herald Sun) of the new City of Melbourne Draft Walking Plan. There’s lots of interesting stuff in the document (PDF, 35Mb). Below are some notes from a skim through. (Page references refer to those at the top of the page, eg numbered from the start of the ... [More]
It must be autumn. PS. Just noting the passing of Sir Jack Brabham, the only Formula 1 driver to ever win in a car he built himself. I couldn’t but help recall Herge’s nod to him in Tintin: The Calculus Affair. (Apparently in the original French, it’s Fangio instead.)
Here’s a puzzler for you: look at this lovely old house. Can you guess the suburb it’s in? Update 12:50pm: Mike got it, by tracking the posts to my Flickr account! It’s in Nicholson Street, central Footscray. While I don’t subscribe to the generalisations of the run-down inner-west, I was delighted to find such a ... [More]
I think it’d be true to say that Melbourne hasn’t done high-density development in the suburbs very well. For example, this monolith in Camberwell, a bit too far away from the railway station, out of scale with (some of) the buildings around it, and I’m sure not well liked by many of the locals. But ... [More]
Sorry, no time to do a proper blog post, so here’s a photo of a rainbow I snapped in Bentleigh on Monday, as dark clouds loomed:
Hearing the news of the ongoing crisis in Ukraine has an added dimension for someone who grew up in East St Kilda. Lots of street names in the area come from the Crimean War — from the British forces, names of battles (which in turn are mostly named after locations), and even Florence Nightingale is ... [More]
Categories
For sale: Idyllic home
What do you think of this house for sale? Inner-city location, described by the real estate agents as an “Idyllic home/Office”. Very cute. Wait a minute. Zoom out. Zoom out a bit more. Turns out it’s on Kings Way, dwarfed by surrounding buildings, and almost drowning in passing traffic. It reminds me a bit of ... [More]
In the face of Labor’s proposal for 24-hour trains and trams at weekends, the State Coalition has been talking up its credentials in public transport. This tweet from Acting Public Transport Minister David Hodgett for example: Only the Coalition can be trusted to deliver better public transport for Victoria: 1,078 extra metro trains &3,870 extra ... [More]
Some years ago I wrote about issues with the City of Melbourne policy of allowing motorbikes and scooters to park on footpaths, except in a few locations where it’s specifically banned. The problem is, most of the guidelines seem to be ignored. The guidelines Here are the guidelines (see also: PDF version): DO dismount and ... [More]
Categories
A day at the races
Perhaps a day at the races with the right skills and knowledge could be quite profitable, but for me (first time in over a decade), it certainly wasn’t a money maker — it was about the company. Quite a glorious day, relaxing, standing in the sunshine, chatting to the blokes I was with, pondering horses ... [More]
Categories
Fire hydrants
This is one of those blog posts which is about something really quite mundane but which might possibly be quite interesting in a decade or three. Maybe. You’ve seen lots of these around. This is a fire hydrant. Or at least, it’s the cover of a hydrant. The bits that actually work are underneath it, ... [More]