Queen Victoria Market

The rows of open sheds and the lanes between them preserve the logic of freight trading: suppliers worked here in the mornings, and then city residents came to the goods. The trading area occupied the northern edge of Old Melbourne Cemetery; a brick wall, preserved beneath Shed F, recalls its former boundary. Food and everyday goods are now sold under these roofs, but there is still no shop door between seller and buyer here.

Vegetable and fruit traders had sought this market for years. They grew their goods outside Melbourne, brought them into the city on carts, and earned money only when there was a place for a cart and a buyer could approach it. Eastern Market, at what is now the intersection of Bourke Street and Exhibition Street, was overcrowded. The traders complained to the city council about the lack of space and poor conditions, but for a long time they were not given a new site.

Vacant land was found beside the meat market. A significant part of it was occupied by Old Melbourne Cemetery. Officials began at the northern edge, where there were a school and a drill hall and fewer burials. In eighteen seventy-seven, builders erected parallel open sheds with access lanes between them. A brick wall separated the southern boundary of the trading area from the remaining cemetery. Part of this wall is still incorporated into Shed F.

On March twentieth, eighteen seventy-eight, the new market opened. It was named after the reigning British Queen Victoria. That morning, about five hundred carts carrying goods arrived here. Sales went well, after which Mayor John Pigdon, who had to convince the traders that their long dispute with the city was over, gave them a free breakfast in the neighboring drill hall.

Those gathered at the tables were mainly market gardeners—the people for whom the sheds had been built. They did not limit themselves to thanks: in their speeches, they again reminded officials how many years they had lacked space and decent trading conditions. Representatives of the colonial administration tried to soften the conversation. But the market gardeners now had the better argument: their carts were already standing under the new roofs, and the morning's goods had been sold.

This is how a layout emerged that the sheds alone do not reveal. First, wholesalers arrived here: trade began early in the morning and continued until noon. Then the same rows opened to ordinary city residents. Sellers laid out vegetables and fruit right by the carts; the lanes between the sheds were left specifically for deliveries and unloading.

Queen Victoria Market took wholesale trade away from the overcrowded Eastern Market and for more than ninety years supplied central Melbourne through it. In nineteen sixty-nine, the wholesalers were moved to a new complex on Footscray Road. The retail section remained here: meat, fish, vegetables, dairy products, and everyday goods in separate halls and rows.

There are no more carts between the sheds. The layout devised for them remains: an open roof, a seller's place on either side of the lane, and a buyer who approaches the goods without a shop door. On the first morning of trading, about five hundred carts fit into these rows—an answer from the city council to people who had previously had nowhere to sell what they grew.