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Streets & Lanes

Melbourne was officially gazetted on 29 March 1837 as the name of the settlement on the north bank of the Yarra River, named by Governor Bourke after the British Whig politician and Prime Minister. Garryowen's Chronicles of Early Melbourne (1888) quotes from a supposed journal of surveyor Robert Hoddle, suggesting that Bourke instructed Hoddle as to the names of the streets. Such a journal has never been subsequently located, and the precise origin of some names remains a matter of speculation. La Trobe Street was part of an 1838 grid extension, and the Little Streets were named in 1839. While Governor Bourke suggested the Little Streets as access routes to service properties fronting the major east-west thoroughfares, Surveyor Hoddle's 1837 street grid made no provision for the lanes or alleys which by the 1850s had quickly proliferated within the city's large blocks. By the mid 1850s there were 80 named lanes and 112 rights-of-way, many private, in central Melbourne. Lanes were used for deliveries, as workshops and extensions of warehouses and factories, for night-soil collection and as tips for rubbish.