City of Darebin Heritage Study Volume 1 Draft Thematic

DAREBIN HERITAGE STUDY STAGE 2cottages for investment (Lemon 1983: 141-2; Butler 1992). These houses display the newFederation style that characterises the house in this estate and surrounding area, and housingthat spread through Northcote, Fairfield and parts of Thornbury prior to the First World War.As noted above Preston waited until Australia’s post- war industrial expansion of the 1920s forits boom. The 1920s was a time of population increase, as servicemen returned from war andsettled down to have families, and a new wave British immigrants arrived. Preston thenattracted more than its share of population growth and also attracted industries moving outfrom inner suburbs, and new factories starting up - the largest being the Tramway Workshopopened in 1925 - which were settling on vacant land away from the centre. Some of Preston’sexisting industries, such as Hutton’s bacon factory and the Clifton Brickworks were alsoexpanding. The industries needed workers, and the workers needed houses. In 1925, thePreston Tramway Corner Estate to the west of St George’s Road was sold and a year laterall the houses in Stephen and Gillingham Streets and part of Davies Street had been builtand occupied, many of them by workers in the Workshops. The predominant housingstyle there was the Californian bungalow (Ward 2000:127-30).As noted in Chapter 3 improved transport links - the electrification of the railway as far asReservoir in 1921 and the two new electric tram routes east and west from High Street - drewnew housing development to the outer areas along the train and tram lines. An 1880ssubdivision known as the Preston Railway Estate - which was further from the railway than thename suggests and consequently had only ten houses by 1918 - began to fill with houses whenthe Gilbert Road tram line commenced. Near the Regent Street terminus at Reservoir, newstreets were given names commemorating the war, such as Monash and Birdwood. By 1929,there were a number of shops in Spring and Edwardes streets. East of Plenty Road 120 newhouses were built in Madeline, Malpas and Rene Streets near the East Preston tram terminus inPlenty Road (Carroll, 1985:130-1).Developing garden suburbsPreston Council, in order to prevent Preston becoming like Collingwood, imposed minimumallotment sizes of 40 foot (12.2 m) and 50 foot (15.2m) frontages. The Preston TramwayCorner Estate, with its deep front gardens and nature strips highlighted this new approachto town planning and the ideal of the Garden Suburb. Merrilands and Leslie Estates inReservoir were designed by the eminent town planner and surveyor, Saxil Tuxen, who hadpreviously worked on ‘model’ garden suburb estates such as Ranelagh at Mount Eliza. Theywere planned on model garden suburb principles, with curving streets and sites for civicbuildings, parks and a railway station, but they were too far out, and remained vacant for manyyears. The Housing Commission eventually built on Merrilands Estate after World War Two(Forster, 1968: 90; Carroll, 1985:127, Summerton, 1997:36-7, 44). However large areas ofPreston were covered with modest timber or brick houses on quarter acre blocks during the1920s and, to a lesser extent, the 1930s, so that Preston came to epitomise the ‘Australiandream’ of honest suburban working-class values (Summerton, 1997:49-50).This period of growth and prosperity also saw the emergence of some middle-class housingestates in Preston, particularly on elevated land close to transport such as the Oakhill Estate.72