Coffee palace

In the late 1870s the idea caught on in Australia, where the appellation "coffee palace" was almost universal, and dozens were built in the 1880s and early 1890s, including some of the largest hotels in the country.

In the 1870s, with an established market, larger and more elaborate temperance hotels began to be built, a trend which continued into the 1880s, and some of these were called a "coffee palace".

[7][8] In Australia, the same imperative for their construction applied as in the UK, as expressed at a meeting at the Melbourne Temperance Hall in October 1878, to build a place "... as attractive as possible for the working man, [which] should combine every facility for harmless amusement and intellectual enjoyment, with the advantages of a large hotel, the only difference being that coffee should be vended instead of intoxicating liquors".

[11] Their promotion occurred at a time of great economic growth in Australia, which perhaps combined with the "moral superiority" behind them,[12] led to their rapid popularity and the construction of many often quite large and elaborate "temperance hotels" in the following decade, nearly always called Coffee Palaces.

[13] This coincided with the popularity of what is now called High Victorian architecture, lavish buildings with richly ornamented facades and interiors, usually Renaissance Revival, perhaps combined with Second Empire elements.

[12] The Scots Presbyterian James Munro, politician and leading Land Boomer, was a champion of the temperance movement in Victoria; in 1886 he formed a company that purchased an already prominent hotel, the Grand on Spring Street built three years previously, and converted it into a temperance hotel, the Grand Coffee Palace, reputedly burning the liquor licence.

Some were converted into guest houses or private hotels (or in one case a school), while others applied for liquor licences and dropped the "coffee palace" title.