Why Collins Street Has a Parisian Dome (And You Never Noticed)

Walk up Collins Street from Elizabeth toward Spring, look up somewhere near number 333, and you'll see a green copper dome. It's beautiful, it's obviously European, and it has absolutely no business being in a colonial city that was a sheep paddock 40 years earlier. That dome is on the old Melbourne Safe Deposit building, and it exists because in the 1880s, Melbourne was — briefly, gloriously — the second-richest city in the British Empire. Gold rush money flooded into banks that suddenly needed to look as permanent, imperial, and unshakeable as the Bank of England. Melbourne's architects had a choice: build sensible Australian buildings, or borrow every classical motif in Europe and stack them on top of each other until nobody could doubt the city's importance. They chose option two, enthusiastically. The result is a two-kilometre stretch of Collins Street that looks like a Parisian boulevard was picked up and gently dropped into the southern hemisphere. By 1893, the boom collapsed. Half the banks failed. But the buildings survived — quietly, elegantly, and with domes their architects were probably too embarrassed to explain.