Melbourne’s lost underground bowling alley

In 1956 it was the back door of the Mutual Store, Melbourne’s first department store, and it took the store the best part of three years to get it. Later, the room behind it held the ten-pin lanes of Mutual Bowl.

The offer the Mutual refused

The Mutual had traded on the corner of Flinders and Degraves Streets since 1872, a co-operative that shared its profits between shareholders and staff. Fire took its first building on New Year’s Day 1891, and Reed, Smart & Tappin, the architects of the Melbourne Town Hall, rebuilt it in red brick within the year.

Across the road stood Flinders Street Station, and between the two ran Flinders Street and its tramlines. The city council had been talking since 1926 about a tunnel to take people under it, from Degraves Street to the station. The man who finally pushed it through was Robert Burns Campbell, a dentist who joined the council in 1944 and rose to chair its public works committee.

By Campbell’s account, the council went to the Mutual first. In about 1950 it wanted the tunnel’s main entrance inside the store, and was ready to spend up to £50,000 to put it there. The directors turned it down.

So the council dug beside them instead, and the store paid for it. In the year to July 1953 the Mutual lost £17,543, and it blamed the works: they had broken up the foot traffic past its doors and, for a time, cost it the use of its windows along Degraves Street. Now the directors wanted a way in. In September 1953 Campbell told them it was too late.

The store directors had only themselves to blame.

The Herald, reporting Cr R. Burns Campbell, 26 September 1953

A month later the two sides had a deal, with the council putting in another £10,000. By March 1954 the Mutual had secured two entrances of its own, one from its Flinders Street front and one at the back of the store, and its chairman, Sir Thomas Nettlefold, told shareholders they would more than make up for the disruption. The directors were betting on the crowds. In June 1954 they paid £100,000 for the Empire Arcade next door, to be ready for the trade the tunnel would bring, and by November they were weighing up a cinema theatrette in its basement.

Six feet of earth

On 3 June 1954 a Herald reporter went down the steps from Degraves Street to become the first member of the public to cross under Flinders Street on foot. He picked his way over air hoses and piles of mullock, through mud, beneath girders and timber props. “We’re right under Flinders Street tramlines now,” the foreman, Dave McRae, told him.

That day a tunneller named Bill Shepherd broke through the last six feet of earth into the railways’ side, right under the station’s barriers. The reporter climbed through the hole, down a ladder, along a narrow tunnel and up another ladder onto No. 1 platform.

Campbell had three weeks left. He died suddenly on 25 June 1954, and the arcade was named after him. It opened to the public on 31 August 1955, all pink tiles, chrome and terrazzo, with every shop still empty, although the council had received more than a thousand applications for its eleven shops and two kiosks. Before the year was out, the council had shut down a parade of models in beach outfits there, on the grounds that they were blocking a public pathway.

The Mutual’s door opened on 20 February 1956. The Argus described it as the store’s new air-conditioned northern entrance. Through it, people coming from the platforms could walk into the store by way of its basement cafeteria.

Ten-pin under the corner

The department store lasted less than ten more years. Peter Kaye Consolidated took it over in 1961; Cleckheaton, a Yorkshire company, bought it in 1964 and closed it in 1965. The Council of Adult Education moved in upstairs and stayed for almost forty years.

Downstairs, the cafeteria became a bowling alley. An undated advertisement, pitched at rugby union players, calls Mutual Bowl “Melbourne’s newest Ten-Pin Bowling Centre”, in the basement of the Mutual Store Building at 256 Flinders Street, with entrances from Flinders Street and from the arcade under Degraves Street. No newspaper we have found records the night the first ball went down the lanes, or the last. What survives is a handful of sightings, a few in print and the rest in people’s memories.

Is it still down there?

The memories don’t agree on when the bowling stopped, and nothing in print settles it. The fate of the lanes is no clearer. When the Mutual and the Empire were turned into apartments, the Mutual gained two floors, fourteen more went up behind the Empire’s facade, and the work included a basement car park. We found no record of what became of the lanes. Whatever is left of Mutual Bowl, it is unlikely to be a bowling alley.

Campbell Arcade reopened in July 2025 after three years of Metro Tunnel works, its tiles and terrazzo restored and a new passage cut through to Town Hall Station. At its blind end the Mutual’s door is still in the wall, closed. It has outlived the store, the cafeteria, the bowling alley and the councillor who told the Mutual it was too late.