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City Square, Melbourne

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Use Australian English from March 2015
City Square, Melbourne, Australia
City Square, Melbourne, Australia

The City Square was a public plaza located in the Central Business District (CBD) of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. The site is currently bounded by Swanston Street, Collins Street, Flinders Lane and the Westin Hotel. The historic landmarks of Melbourne Town Hall and St Paul’s Cathedral are across the streets to the north and south respectively. The square has been redeveloped several times and associated with a number of controversies over the years. The square closed on 3 April 2017 in preparation for the construction of Town Hall railway station, and was demolished later that year.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article City Square, Melbourne (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

City Square, Melbourne
Flinders Street, Melbourne Melbourne

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Wikipedia: City Square, MelbourneContinue reading on Wikipedia

Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N -37.816 ° E 144.967 °
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Address

Town Hall (CBD South)

Flinders Street
3000 Melbourne, Melbourne
Victoria, Australia
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City Square, Melbourne, Australia
City Square, Melbourne, Australia
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Nicholas Building
Nicholas Building

The Nicholas Building is a landmark historic office and retail building located at 37 Swanston St, at the intersection of Swanston Street and Flinders Lane, in the central business district of Melbourne, Australia. Designed by architect Harry Norris and completed in 1926, it is the grandest example in Melbourne of what is known as the 'Chicago School' or 'Commercial Palazzo' style, featuring large scale classical elements. It has long housed a range of small businesses, and is now known for its creative industry tenants such as fashion designers and artists and specialist retailers. It had the longest operating manual lifts in the city, and the ground floor Cathedral Arcade is one of the most notable arcades in the city. While the building structure itself is protected, it does not prevent the change of its use. The building was placed on the market in June 2021. This has led the Nicholas Building Association to campaign to raise funds in order to rescue the current use of the building as a creative hub from commercial development. As a result, some artists in the community have raised awareness that the lack of protection for the use of buildings can have adverse effects in protecting heritage:"However, usage is rarely safeguarded - heritage protection is mainly concerned about the look of a building. And mainly concerned about how it looks from the street. Interiors are mostly disregarded unless there's some aspect about it that has gathered some public fame. In other words, heritage protection is superficial at best and fairly ineffective in protecting what is worth protecting. Safeguarding a city entails much more than protecting the 'decorative' features of a façade."

Melbourne
Melbourne

Melbourne ( (listen) MEL-bərn) (Boonwurrung: Naarm) is the capital and most-populous city of the Australian state of Victoria, and the second-most populous city in both Australia and Oceania. Its name generally refers to a 9,993 km2 (3,858 sq mi) metropolitan area known as Greater Melbourne, comprising an urban agglomeration of 31 local municipalities, although the name is also used specifically for the local municipality of City of Melbourne based around its central business area. The city occupies much of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay and spreads into the Mornington Peninsula and the hinterlands towards the Yarra Valley and the Dandenong and Macedon Ranges. It has a population over 5-million (19% of the population of Australia, as per 2020), mostly residing to the east side of the city centre, and its inhabitants are commonly referred to as "Melburnians".The area of Melbourne has been home to Aboriginal peoples for over 40,000 years and serves as an important meeting place for local Kulin nation clans. Of the five peoples of the Kulin nation, the traditional owners of the land encompassing Melbourne are the Boonwurrung and the Wurundjeri peoples. The name Naarm is commonly used by the broader Aboriginal community to refer to the city, stemming from the traditional Boonwurrung name for Port Phillip Bay.A short-lived penal settlement was built at Port Phillip, then part of the British colony of New South Wales, in 1803, but it was not until 1835, with the arrival of free settlers from Van Diemen's Land (modern-day Tasmania), that Melbourne was founded. It was incorporated as a Crown settlement in 1837, and named after the then British Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. In 1851, four years after Queen Victoria declared it a city, Melbourne became the capital of the new colony of Victoria. During the 1850s Victorian gold rush, the city entered a lengthy boom period that, by the late 1880s, had transformed it into one of the world's largest and wealthiest metropolises. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it served as the interim seat of government of the new nation until Canberra became the permanent capital in 1927. Today, it is a leading financial centre in the Asia-Pacific region and ranks 23rd globally in the 2021 Global Financial Centres Index.Melbourne is home to many of Australia's best-known landmarks, such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the National Gallery of Victoria and the World Heritage-listed Royal Exhibition Building. Noted for its cultural heritage, the city gave rise to Australian rules football, Australian impressionism and Australian cinema, and has more recently been recognised as a UNESCO City of Literature and a global centre for street art, live music and theatre. It hosts major annual international events, such as the Australian Grand Prix and the Australian Open, and also hosted the 1956 Summer Olympics and the 2006 Commonwealth Games, and will host the 2026 Commonwealth Games, along with a number of regional areas of Victoria. It was host to the 1880 World's Fair. Melbourne consistently ranked as the world's most liveable city for much of the 2010s.Melbourne Airport, also known as the Tullamarine Airport, is the second-busiest airport in Australia, and the Port of Melbourne is the nation's busiest seaport. Its main metropolitan rail terminus is Flinders Street station and its main regional rail and road coach terminus is Southern Cross station. It also has Australia's most extensive freeway network and the largest urban tram network in the world.