St Kilda Town Hall

This site was reserved in 1883, selected in 1887, and an elaborate towered design by architect William Pitt in an ornate Second Empire style won a limited competition in 1888.

The building's other brick walls stayed bare until 1957 when they were finally stuccoed over and painted white, in a simplified classical form without any elaboration, not even the column capitals.

[4] A further expansion took place in the 2000s on the Carlisle Street side completed in February 2008, incorporating the dividing glass wall removed from the hall, opening it up again.

[5] The Town Hall sits in an unusually spacious setting, with sweeping lawns and a circular driveway leading to the grand front staircase and portico.

In the 1930s, unemployed people picked up their sugar bags of donated food during the Great Depression; a thousand women in hats, gloves, pearls and floral frocks joined the Queen Mother for morning tea in 1958; and the last of former prime minister Gough Whitlam's "It's Time" rallies was held there in 1972.