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Mutual Building · 9 Degraves Street

The dead end in the subway used to lead to a bowling alley

20 October 20265 minute readSources

Come down the stairs from Degraves Street into the pink-tiled subway and look beside them. A short passage runs off towards the corner building and stops at a wall. In 1956 that wall was a door into the Mutual Store. Later, behind it, was a ten-pin bowling alley called Mutual Bowl.

“How about a light?” Bill Shepherd, who dug from the Degraves Street end, asks George Barnett of the Railways on 3 June 1954, the day the two tunnels met under Flinders Street Station. Ron McCullock looks on. The Herald, 3 June 1954, p. 3. National Library of Australia. Trove record

This month a video of that wall went round Instagram, asking whether the bowling alley is still down there. Most of the answer is on paper: in the newspapers of the 1950s, in a navy paper and a railway magazine of the 1970s, and in what people who bowled there remember.

The store that said no

The subway was first thought of in 1926 and finally dug in the 1950s, in time for the Olympics. Above it, on the corner of Flinders and Degraves Streets, stood the Mutual Store, rebuilt after a fire in 1891. By the account of Robert Burns Campbell, the councillor who ran the council’s public works, the council had wanted the subway’s main entrance inside the Mutual in about 1950, and was ready to spend up to £50,000 on it. The directors declined.

Then the digging began beside the store. In the year to July 1953 the Mutual lost £17,543, and blamed it largely on the works: they had broken up the foot traffic and, for a time, cost it the use of its windows along Degraves Street.

Now the store wanted in. In September 1953 Campbell said it was too late to add one without delaying the job, and the main entrance would go across the lane instead.

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 paying 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. Its chairman, Sir Thomas Nettlefold, told shareholders the entrances would more than make up for the disruption.

The Mutual bet on the crowds in other ways too. By June 1954 it had paid £100,000 for the Empire Arcade next door, to be ready for the trade the subway would bring. That November its directors were thinking about a movie theatrette in the Empire’s basement.

Campbell died while the subway was being built, and its arcade of shops was named after him. The arcade opened on 31 August 1955. The Mutual’s door at the back, air-conditioned, was opened on 20 February 1956.

The cafeteria, then the bowling alley

That door led through the store’s basement cafeteria. Heritage Victoria’s history of the arcade records that the cafeteria later became a bowling alley.

The department store didn’t last. Peter Kaye Consolidated took over the Mutual in 1961. Cleckheaton, a Yorkshire company, took over in 1964 and closed the store in 1965, and the Council of Adult Education moved in upstairs for almost forty years.

Downstairs, the lanes carried on. An undated advertisement aimed 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 Degraves Street subway. We couldn’t find the year it opened. This is what we could find.

In print

  • April 1971 Navy News reports that a sailor, Felix Clayton, finished fourth in a ten-pin duplex final at Mutual Bowl.
  • February 1974 Rail Ways, the Victorian Railways’ staff magazine, says the railway ten-pin club will start its year at Mutual Bowl at 6 pm on Monday 4 February, and that shift workers can bowl whenever they are free.
  • 2006 The Mutual Store and the Empire Arcade reopen as apartments. The architects’ description of the work lists a basement car park.

Remembered

  • 1977 A junior bowler from Morwell remembers winning the Moomba junior doubles there, on about fourteen lanes, some pairs split by columns.
  • The 1980s Another bowler remembers bowling there before it closed: wooden lanes, and one lane, lane 14 as he recalls, with a kink in its boards.
  • 1979 to 1981 Two people, separately, remember the bowling alley becoming a video-game arcade called Invaders. One puts it at 1979, the other at 1980 or 1981.
  • The mid-1990s The same bowler went down to the basement more than once to look. He found it dark and shut, but could still make out the lane markings.

The memories don’t agree on when the bowling stopped, and nothing we found in print settles it.

So is it still down there?

Probably not as a bowling alley. When the Mutual and the Empire were turned into apartments, the Mutual gained two floors, fourteen new floors went up behind the Empire’s front, and the work included a basement car park. We found no record of what became of the lanes.

Where to look. The subway runs under Degraves Street from the stairs, then under Flinders Street to the station. The Mutual’s 1956 door was at the north end, on the store’s side. Drawn by Heritage Melbourne from OpenStreetMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors). The door’s position is approximate.

The door is the part that lasted. The store turned the subway down, then fought its way into it. Its doorway is still there at the blind end beside the Degraves Street stairs, long after the store, its cafeteria and its bowling alley.

The arcade reopened in July 2025 after three years of Metro Tunnel works, and a new passage now runs from it to Town Hall Station. Take the stairs down from Degraves Street and the dead end is beside you.

Sources21 records
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