City walk · Melbourne · Australia
Robert Hoddle
1794–1881 · a real person
a precise, dry old colonial surveyor, proud of his right angles, vain about his street widths, and by the end quietly unsettled by what his lines covered over
Read what Robert Hoddle says
My name is Robert Hoddle, and in 1837 I was handed a riverbank with a few hundred souls on it and told to make a town of it. What I made was a grid — a mile long, half a mile wide, every main street ninety-nine feet across, every corner square to the next. You are standing inside it; you have never once stepped outside my lines today. Walk east and south with me and I will show you what grew in each block I measured — and, at the river, something I measured over without ever once looking down.
4.0 (1)82 min · 2.8 km · 8 stops · medium
You’re walking this one before anyone at Walk & Tell has. If something looks wrong, tap Report at any stop — we’ll fix it for everyone after you.
Partly shadedBest time to walk: Early morning or late afternoon. The Swanston and Collins Street corners bake at midday with no shade, St Paul's is open to visitors most days but services can close parts of the nave, and the river path to the MCG is loveliest an hour before sunset.
The walk
In 1837 a surveyor with a chain and a theodolite scratched a grid of streets into a riverbank camp of a few hundred settlers, and five million people have been walking inside his lines ever since. This story walk follows Robert Hoddle east and south through the blocks he measured — the money end of Collins Street, the town hall his rate-payers built, the cathedral corner, the station steps, the river — and ends where his lines run out, on the old Government Paddock that became the MCG. There are no puzzles, only a man with strong opinions about street widths and a slowly dawning understanding of whose ground he drew on. It is a walk about ownership: who measured this place, who named it, and who was here for forty thousand years before the chain came out of the box.
