City Gets Behind Lendlease’s $1.7bn Gurrowa Place

Lendlease’s three-tower project in the heart of the Melbourne CBD has won the support of the city.

The developer’s Gurrowa Place project south of the Queen Victoria Markets would comprise three towers for student accommodation, apartments and office space on Franklin Street.

At its Future Melbourne Committee meeting this week, the City of Melbourne voted to support the Lendlease plan.

“It’s been nearly 30 years since a project of this size has been undertaken,” acting Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said.

“You have to go back to the Crown entertainment complex in the 1990s to find a project of this size being undertaken.

“This is a $1.7-billion development and it will be one of the biggest in Melbourne’s history.”

As part of it, Franklin Street would be realigned to create a road for heavy traffic through to a main road.

Heritage Victoria previously added its support for the project as the Queen Victoria Markets sits on the site of Melbourne’s first cemetery and has several heritage listed buildings around it.

The cemetery was established in 1837 and closed in 1917 before the markets were established. Between 6500 and 9000 burials are thought to have been carried out there, including a section for Aboriginal burials.

Among the heritage-listed buildings are the Franklin Street stores on the Gurrowa Place site.

These will be adaptively reused and conserved as part of the project, with two of the towers cantilevered over the top of the stores.

Approval was also granted for a separate application by Lendlease to commence early works for basement level spaces.

▲ A render of what the Market Square at Queen Victoria Markets will look like once it is turned from a car park into a public open space.

The towers were designed by NH Architecture, Kerstin Thompson Architects, 3XN Australia, Searle x Waldron Architecture, Openwork, McGregor Coxall, Lovell Chen and Urbis.

As part of the Queen Victoria Markets redevelopment project, Lendlease would also create 1.8ha of open public space from a current car park space and move that parking underground.

The entire project has an estimated cost of $1.7 billion.

The final determination will now be made by the Victorian planning minister Sonya Kilkenny after the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning considers advice from third-party authorities.

Heritage Victoria’s approval will expire if construction has not begun on the project within two years or if the project has not been completed within six years from the permit issue date.

Queen Victoria Markets is undergoing redevelopment to turn it into the centre of a new residential hub and precinct, and to ensure traders are able to work in safer and more efficient conditions.

Also at the meeting, the committee voted to pass Reece’s motion to create and publish guidelines for adaptive reuse for office buildings in Melbourne's CBD.