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    Manchester House, 38 Manchester Lane, Melbourne VIC 3000
    The BuildingsMANCHESTER LANE

    Manchester House

    ArchitectBates, Peebles & Smart
    Completed1912
    The building

    Manchester House was built in 1911–1912 to a design by the architecture firm Bates, Peebles & Smart, for the Adelaide clothing manufacturers G & R Wills and Company, marking their entry into the Melbourne clothing industry then centred on Flinders Lane. Built as a warehouse, showroom and offices for the clothing trade, it later took in retail and was converted to include apartments above the lower office floors.

    The doorstep

    Three places within a short walk.

    What each one is, and how far it is from the front door. Select a place to see it on the map.

    1
    Nature424 m · 5 min walk
    Birrarung Marr
    The city's first major new parkland in a century, terraced down to the Yarra with a Wurundjeri name meaning river of mists.
    2
    Dining270 m · 3 min walk
    MoVida
    Frank Camorra's tapas bar opened in 2003 down graffiti-covered Hosier Lane and taught the city to eat Spanish.
    3
    Character156 m · 2 min walk
    The Melbourne Athenaeum
    Founded in 1839, it housed the city's first library and gallery and still runs a subscription library above Collins St.
    For buyers

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    From The Journal

    Manchester House in The Journal

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    Flinders Lane, the rag-trade corridor

    Gazetted in 1843, signposted as Little Flinders Street into the 1930s, and known to the clothing trade simply as the Lane — the street where Melbourne's rag trade lived, now lived in.

    Read the piece →

    Manchester Lane, off Collins Street

    A short lane off Collins named the way drapers talk, where Robert Haddon's green-tiled 1912 front startled the trade press — and the warehouses now hold homes.