My suburb is four kilometres from the city, but people still don’t quite know where it is. It’s like people have a black hole in their mental map of Melbourne. When I tell people I’m from Kensington, I’m often met with blank stares that only flicker into vague recognition when I add, “It’s next to Flemington … you know, where the horse races are?”
How can a suburb so central, serviced by no fewer than three train lines and the renowned 402 bus, perched on the edge of the CBD, remain so unknown?
Ruby Alexander
Wedged between North Melbourne, Flemington and Footscray, Kensington today feels like it’s hiding. It’s more a waypoint than destination, and most people whizz overhead on the freeway en route to the airport, or pass by on the express train to the racecourse. Local real estate agents often describe it as having a “village feel”, and while it may sound glib, it rings true. Its quiet and stubbornly unhip streets can feel closer to a country town than the inner city. That may simply be a function of its size. Kensington is just 2.1 square kilometres, and driving anywhere within the suburb is unnecessary.
Favourite youth pastimes were always best done on foot: a trip to the tragically defunct Kensington Pizza to have a halal parma, or the after-school ritual of getting a potato cake and a can of coke at the fish and chip shop before football training.
My two best friends lived on either side of my house on plane tree-lined Wolseley Parade, a street of Victorian terraces and Edwardian cottages typical of much of Kensington. My house was the little Edwardian squeezed between their much grander Victorians, a fact my parents have never quite gotten over. I could be at my mate’s place in seconds via my preferred route: climbing the fence, crossing the shed roof and sliding down the slide his dad nicked from the skip when they were renewing the old playground at Holland Park. School was only a 45-second walk, too, provided Ms Marg was feeling generous enough to let you through her place and out the back gate.
Living in a village where everyone knows your name has its downsides. Like when you are 17, trying to sneak a couple of beers in Skinny Park by the railway line while admiring the city view. Someone’s mum will inevitably appear to yell at you, and probably text your mum as well, just to be thorough. Or the following morning, when your hungover self shuffles down the street for a restorative banh mi and runs into your former primary school teacher, who proceeds to quiz you about your career aspirations. Still, the burden of these encounters is outweighed by the knowledge that people are looking out for you.
Growing up in Kensington, you were never quite sure where you fit in. The suburb has always struggled to find its place in the west’s new, hip ecosystem. The cheaper period homes and proximity to the city that drew artists and young families to Footscray, Yarraville and Seddon during the noughties were here too, yet somehow we remained largely overlooked. Not quite west enough to claim full westsider status, not quite inner-north enough either, or so I’ve been told, repeatedly.
For a village, there are some things missing. We have no organic grocer like in Seddon, no artisanal sausage maker like in Yarraville. Attempts to inject fresh life into the Macaulay Road strip have been, at best, short-lived and, at worst, a bit suspect. For a brief moment, we had five hairdressers. There was a Latin-Asian culinary fusion experiment, a poutine restaurant, and a combination smoke and lolly shop that simply vanished one day. Even when it looks as though we might finally have something good, such as a well-known upmarket wine store, it quietly ups sticks. Our boutique homewares store, Tempted, is one of the few to stand the test of time, thriving off the mum economy.
Now, with our first proper wine bar, Arnold’s, enjoying some success, locals are cautiously optimistic that our luck has changed. But in Kensington, you never quite know. That smoke and lolly shop seemed like a sure thing too.
Kensington’s charms aren’t immediately obvious. They’re in the people and places you only get to know if you stay a while. The El Salvadorian women selling pupusas at Saturday soccer in JJ Holland Park. The Women’s Peace Garden, where somehow you can’t hear the gridlocked traffic on Epsom Road just metres away. Kids attempting backflips on the trampolines at our adventure playground, the Venny. And the quiet certainty that if your family dog escaped, it would be returned by someone who knew exactly where you lived. It happened more than once with my friend’s lackadaisical spaniel, Malibu.
It wasn’t always so neighbourly.
Melburnians who do know Kensington tend to forget that beneath its mild, bashful character lies a more dubious past. Growing up, the urban myth was that the Kensington footy club was thrown out of the league for being too thuggish, resulting in us having to play under the Flemington name ever since. While that might be a tall tale, it’s true that for a long time, Kensington was little more than an open-air abattoir that enveloped the western suburbs in a malodorous funk.
The stockyards and abattoir remained operational until 1987. Their closure and redevelopment ushered in the gentrification responsible for the suburb’s softer edges and more agreeable smell. The pub where you might once have witnessed a bikie flung through a window now serves craft beer. One of the last remnants of Kensington’s industrial era, the Four’N Twenty pie factory, closed in 2003. My mum recalls her favourite day being Tuesday, baking day, when the scent of pies would settle over the suburb in a buttery cloud.
As new apartment blocks rise along Macaulay Road and Stubbs Street, developments some locals have nicknamed the “Great Wall of Stubbs Street”, Kensington is changing again. At the same time, the public housing towers that have long anchored the skyline, and been a home for generations of migrant families and longtime residents, face an uncertain future.
It is easy to assume that the height and density of the new developments will change the place beyond recognition. But Kensington has reinvented itself before. When the Kensington Banks estate rose on the old stockyards in the 1990s, many locals feared the worst. Now it’s desirable.
Locals know our character has never come from shopfronts or period façades so much as from people living in close quarters and staying long enough to know one another. Most Melburnians may not know where Kensington is, but that’s OK. We do.
Ethan Seiderman is a freelance journalist and proud Kensingtonian.
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