You've probably heard of Open House. It's a weekend (usually around my birthday in September) when normally closed buildings around London throw their doors open to the public (and I pretend they're doing it as a birthday present for me!). So the weekend just finished Melbourne had its Open House Weekend. Ok, so there's no Gherkin or ancient churches but there was still plenty to visit and I crammed as much as possible in, between seeing a film at the Melbourne Film Festival (Jane Eyre - good but a bit slow) and an evening of British sitcoms (Blackadder, Mighty Boosh, and lots of Alan Partridge). What idiot said (in a post quite recently) that Melbourne's dull?
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| Royal Exhibition Building - as featured in a previous blog (when they had the tattooing and piercing convention). As lovely today as when it was the home of Australia's first national parliament. |
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| Orica Building - at one point (in 1958 when it was first built) this was the tallest building in Australia. Prior to this there had been a height limit for buildings and this was the first one allowed to break the rule. Today you hardly notice it as it's dwarfed by lots of much taller skyscrapers. |
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| Interior of the Orica Building - very Mad Men. |
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| The architecture company that built the Orica Building still works in it. These are some models for projects they're working on (with the real thing behind) |
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| You can't have too many models (maybe I should have been an architect - or a model maker) |
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| St Peter's Eastern Hill - one of Melbourne's oldest buildings, built in 1847, just 12 years after the city was founded. |
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| Church interior |
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| Bishopscourt - lovely bluestone building that's the home of the Archbishop of Melbourne. (Bluestone is a common stone used in many buildings in Melbourne) |
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| Another building that was open was the Old Treasury where the top nugget here is a replica of the largest single nugget of gold ever found. You'd get a lot of Tim Tams* for that. |
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| Parliament House - built in 1880 and home to Victoria's parliament (it housed the national Australian government from 1901 until 1927 when it moved to Canberra). |
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| The main house of Victoria's parliament. |
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| One guess who the statue is of (clue: Melbourne's the capital of the state named after this person) |
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| Rooftop garden in the middle of the city, with the Eureka Tower (Australia's current highest building) in the background. |
G'bye.
Cliff
* Tim Tams, if you don't know, are like Penguin biscuits but much better (especially the dark chocolate ones).
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