I’ve lived in Melbourne’s CBD for 20 years. Here’s what’s changed

Coffee at Little Mule, or a beer in the strange loading-zone jumble that was St Jerome’s. A pastrami roll and music played off vinyl at Rue Bebelons. Hardware picked up from Bunnings on Bourke Street. Buying a magazine from McGills on Elizabeth Street before heading up Little Bourke past John Donne & Son’s map shop to that Iranian restaurant near Hardware Lane (even I can’t remember its name).

This is what living in the Melbourne CBD for the past 20 years has gifted me: a strange mental muddle of cafes, shops and bars that have come and gone, surviving as ghosts in the memory of a long-term city resident.

As Cara Waters wrote on Wednesday, since the pandemic the city centre is shifting from a place of business to a place where people live, and live it up. An increasing number of people are likely to base themselves in the city centre. So what’s it like living here?

At noon on February 28, I’ll have lived in the Melbourne CBD for exactly 20 years, in an apartment within a converted office block on the corner of Elizabeth and Little Bourke Streets, opposite the GPO. When my wife Narrelle and I made the move from Richmond in 2003, we thought we were moving into the big city. To our surprise, we moved into a village.

Over time, our patch of the CBD was revealed as sharing the characteristics of a country town. There were plenty of big businesses – Myer just over the road, for example – but also many small businesses run by their owners, who we got to know. Some are still around now, for example, Tarsem Singh at the nearby 7-Eleven, who’s been meeting our last-minute food shopping whims for two decades.

Other local heroes include Stephen Johnson and Sabrina Santucci, the husband-and-wife duo who originally co-owned Federal Coffee Palace cafe in the GPO building’s colonnade and then opened Whitehart, a quintessential Melbourne laneway bar in a former parking lot off Little Bourke Street. I’ve been dealing with the optometrists just along Elizabeth Street for the entire 20 years, and there’s a shoemaker past Hardware Lane who has been there as long.

Though it initially lacked supermarkets and lending libraries, the CBD of 2003 had more diversity of shopping than it does today, with rising commercial rents hollowing out its variety. Over time, closed businesses seemed to be replaced by one of two things: food or fashion. Nowadays the CBD has few newsagencies, fish and chip shops, launderettes, hardware stores or second-hand bookshops. We do have a lot of bubble tea shops.

People often ask me what it’s like to live in the city. To paraphrase Dickens, it’s the best of places and the worst of places. On Friday and Saturday nights the noise can be a pain, though if you live in the city you expect that. Maintenance (roads, drains, tram tracks, whatever) late on weeknights is far more annoying. The horrific episodes of tragic deaths due to drug-fuelled driving or terrorism were traumatic and heart-rending. And during the lockdown era the Melbourne CBD morphed from being the best place to live to the worst, a grim place of locked doors and empty laneways.