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South Melbourne is an inner suburb of Melbourne, Australia, 2 km south of Melbourne's Central Business District (CBD). It is in the local government area of the City of Port Phillip. At the 2011 Census, South Melbourne had a population of 9,317.
Historically known as Emerald Hill, it was one of the first of Melbourne's suburbs to adopt full municipal status and is one of Melbourne's oldest suburban areas, notable for its well preserved Victorian era streetscapes.
Before European settlement, the area now called South Melbourne featured a single hill (where the Town Hall now stands) surrounded by swamps. The Hill was a traditional social and ceremonial meeting place for Aboriginal tribes.
The area was first settled by Europeans in the 1840s and became known as Emerald Hill.
During the Victorian Gold Rush of 1851 a tent city, known as Canvas Town was established. The area soon became a massive slum, home to tens of thousands of migrants from around the world.
Land sales at Emerald Hill began in 1852 and independence from Melbourne was granted, when Emerald Hill was proclaimed a borough on 26 May 1855.[2] Many of the residents of Canvas Town moved to prefabricated cottages in suburbs like Collingwood and South Melbourne and some of these early homes remain in South Melbourne's Coventry Street.
The new municipality developed rapidly and by 1872 Emerald Hill was proclaimed a town. During the late 1870s, South Melbourne became a favoured place of residents for Melbourne's middle class, with fashionable terraced housing becoming the norm, including some English style squares, the best example of which was St Vincent Gardens. The South Melbourne Town Hall was built between 1879 and 1880 and designed in suitable grandeur to evoke the city's booming status, establishing a civic heart at Bank Street, bordered by Clarendon, Park, Cecil and Dorcas Streets. In 1883 Emerald Hill became a city, changing its official name to South Melbourne.
South Melbourne experienced a decline in the 1950s as Melbourne sprawled outwards. Like many other Melbourne inner city suburbs, during the 1960s, the Housing Commission of Victoria stepped in and erected several high-rise public housing towers, the tallest and largest of which, Park Towers (c.1969) is in South Melbourne. 'Emerald Hill Court' is the other housing commission building located in South Melbourne (c.1962). The result was an injection of migrants adding to the multicultural flavour of the area.
In the 1980s, South Melbourne experienced one of Melbourne's biggest waves of gentrification.[citation needed] Many of the terrace homes were restored and renovated and a new middle class moved in. As a result of the development of Southbank in the 1990s, Clarendon Street has become one of the highest rental yielding commercial streets[citation needed] in the entire city of Melbourne, attracting many of the residents from the apartment buildings to shop.
Recently, there has been some new developments within South Melbourne and at the Southbank end of Clarendon Street, including Australia's largest hotel
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