Metropolitan Meat Market, primarily known as Meat Market, in Melbourne, Australia, is a former market building that also incorporates the Metropolitan Hotel. It was designed by George Johnson and completed in 1874. It has been listed on the Victorian Heritage Register since 1973. The venue has undergone many iterations and currently serves as an arts venue under the City of Melbourne. Annually, the venue hosts cultural and social events ranging from theatre, circus, dance to food and wine fairs, music launches and private functions, in addition to festivals including Melbourne Fringe Festival, RISING, and Yirramboi Festival.
History
Built in 1880, the Meat Market was originally conceived as a large-scale metropolitan trade space for meat vendors. The market ceased to trade in 1974. The building remained unused until 1977, when the property was acquired by the state government and transformed into an arts centre, inaugurated in 1979. The space functioned as an office and workshop with arts and craft organisations and artists. A 2004 refurbishment included more office space. The City of Melbourne has developed the venue into a major arts and cultural space. Meat Market now houses over 50 individuals and arts businesses. Meat Market is an important hub for arts development and presentation within Melbourne’s arts scene, hosting hundreds of events each year including in Melbourne International Arts Festival, Melbourne Fringe Festival, Yirramboi and more.
Design and construction Meat Market was designed by George R. Johnson in 1879. An emigrant from Edmonton, London, Johnson was chosen to design the new market because of his experience in designing the former Victoria Meat Market. He was also the architect of Hotham Town Hall (known now as Melbourne Town Hall) and Civic Buildings, where William Reynolds, said to be the moving spirit behind the building of Meat Market, officiated as Mayor in 1878. Johnson later went on to design a score of other buildings in the area, and designed modifications on Meat Market's layout before dying en route to Melbourne from died of blood poisoning in 1898. With six shareholders of the former Victoria Meat Market and two others, influential trader William Reynolds formed the Metropolitan Meat Market Company with a view to building on land on the corner of Courtney and Blackwood Streets. Ornamentations in the venue include Reynolds as the bewhiskered figure whose modelled head appears over the Courtney Street inside entrance doors, and the 1874 in the pediment above the Blackwood Street entrance is the foundation date of the Victoria Meat Market Company. The building complex which Johnson designed for the Metropolitan Meat Market Company was an ambitious one, which it was proposed to complete in stages. The initial contract work, completed between September 1879 and December 1880, was to include the market hall itself for a length of thirteen bays from Courtney Street, with two additional bays projecting to the north; the offices fronting Courtney Street; and the hotel fronting both Blackwood and Courtney Streets but extending along Blackwood Street only so far north as it does at present, not up to the entrance gate. It was decided during the course of the contract to proceed with the bank (now the Blackwood Street Gallery) and manager's quarters, on the north side of the Blackwood Street gate, and it is probable that the gate itself and the façade linking up to the hotel were also undertaken. It was decided by 1880 to put in hand the first of the shops, being that on the South side of the Blackwood Street gate and it appears that instead of providing a house attached to the shop, as originally intended, quarters for the market caretaker were incorporated. The entranceway between the Blackwood Street gate and the market hall proper was at this stage left unroofed. This work did not embrace the buildings fronting Blackwood Street to the north of the present courtyard all of which are of later date. The 56 feet (17 metres) to the north of the bank were in 1889 leased to one Dunkerley for construction of a cooling chamber on what was actually described at the time as vacant ground. It appears that the construction of this was not proceeding satisfactorily and the Company intervened to carry out the work. G.R. Johnson was again commissioned and the new structure was given a façade harmonising with the existing building, though only one storey in height, and linked to them by a screen wall across in the front of a courtyard, now repurposed to the North Melbourne entrance.
Extensions and early use
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