Royal Parade is a major urban road in Victoria, Australia, linking Melbourne City to Brunswick and the northern suburbs.

It runs north-south through the centre of the suburb of Parkville and terminates at the beginning of Sydney Road in Brunswick at the intersection of Park Street.

Originally following the stock-route bearing north out of the settlement of Melbourne in the 1830s, the "Sydney road" that wound through what is now Princes Park was aligned in about 1852 along the north-south datum line established by surveyor Robert Hoddle.

[10]On 28 October 1878, the City Council resolved to adopt the name "Royal Parade", however it took many years for "Sydney Road" to be replaced in common speech.

[12] Council debated the merits of a tramway "from the Sarah Sands Hotel to Grattan-street for the use of the brick traffic from Brunswick" for several months before it proceeded at a cost of just over £3,000.

In 1913, the road was transformed again, with the original planting replaced with 400 English elms in four rows, separating the double-width central carriageway from the two outer service lanes.

In recent years the council has expended large sums of money to improve the street in conformity with the general plan for the beautification of the metropolis.

[17] The tram line that runs on Royal Parade itself was electrified in 1935, the conversion from a cable system requiring the installation of poles and sets of overhead wires, the construction of a depot in Brunswick and the purchase of 40 new tramcars, at a total cost of £500,000.

Where the road crossed the underpass for the now-closed Inner Circle railway line, the relatively narrow bridge meant that the two side avenues became dead ends.

[23] On 12 August 2019, Associate Professor Allison Milner, a 36-year-old researcher in social epidemiology at the University of Melbourne died from injuries received when one of the elm trees along Princes Park fell on her while she was walking to work.

Royal Parade itself was listed by Heritage Victoria in 2009, as a site of State significance, being a fine example of the internationally City Beautiful planning movement.

With Victoria's conversion to the newer alphanumeric system in the late 1990s, Royal Parade remained signed as National Highway 31, eventually replaced with Metropolitan Route 55 in 2005 (when the Craigieburn bypass opened).