The Old Colonial Inn on Brunswick St, which closed in the middle of last year, has been bought by developers who have submitted plans to council indicating that they want to build a much larger venue with the capacity for many more customers than allowed for by the existing pub licence.
The following information comes courtesy of the Old Colonial Inn Action Group (Facebook), which has started a campaign to challenge what it sees as the excessive redevelopment proposal for the building. It claims that the redevelopment proposes:
- A huge new clubbing environment with triple the existing floor size
- Licensed for more than 500 patrons
- A party venue, not a local pub, with a 3.00am liquor licence for drinking six nights a week
- New open outdoor bars / decks on the first and second floors with no noise control
- No car parking or bicycle parking provided
- No strategy to minimise noise transmission into residential areas.
The group believes this is out of character and out of scale with Brunswick St and Fitzroy. They compare it to King St in the CBD.
I think most Fitzroy residents don’t want such large venues with so many patrons open very late at night. We’d prefer it if all the bogans went to King St. We don’t want to invite more of their violent anti-social behaviour into Fitzroy.
4 October 2012 at 7:55 am
Thanks for bringing this to our attention Brian. The last thing the area needs is a development of this type. Its bad enough as it is picking your way through the weekend broken bottles and vomit on the streets ..
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4 October 2012 at 10:58 am
It looks way too big to me in an area surrounded by residential land front and back. Lots of public housing just across Brunswick St too. Would be incredibly expensive to sound proof them all. Geoff
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4 October 2012 at 1:10 pm
Whatever else happens, it would be great if they restored the facade to its c1850 appearance – if that date is correct its one of the oldest buildings in Fitzroy ! good photo in previous post, so it would be easy to do, at least on the upper floor, and reconstructing the dormer windows. Building in at the rear to make sure whatever happens is sondproofed is of course also essential – big outdoor decks would mean rather a lot of noise late into the night- you can cope when a neighbour has a party occasionally, but every night !
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4 October 2012 at 6:59 pm
The standard response you get from morons is something along the lines that if you live in the inner city you should expect noise. Fair enough (to a point) if you live in a commercial precinct. But what if you live in a residential street? The same environmental laws pertaining to noise do still apply, as I understand it.
We lived in a residential street, suffered from noise generated by nearby bogan dickheads who partied, yelled and urinated all over the place at all hours. Sometimes these dumb pigs started at 2am and partied onwards. Even though we live in a residential street, we still had morons (including one from the City Of Yarra) telling us (or implying) that we should expect noise because we chose to live in the inner city.
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5 October 2012 at 7:55 am
I’m generally in favour of the ‘we were here first’ rule. If new apartments are built next to a pub that hosts live music, the apartments need to have appropriate sound reduction features. Council is deficient and negligent in not forcing developers to build appropriately. They need to be held to account for the inevitable social problems that result from conflicts about noise.
Equally, when a new commercial building is being proposed for an existing residential area, it must be developed appropriately to fit into its surroundings.
The noise from music and crowd inside the venue is one thing, but for many residents the greater noise problem is from people who leave venues and make noise in the street afterwards. The larger the venue, the greater the crowd and the more likely they will be bogan dickheads. They respond to to a critical mass. This is why I think the size of the venue matters and why local residents should oppose very large development proposals.
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