What House is That? forum
Welcome to the neighbourhood. Discover Victoria’s nine housing styles. From the modest to the magnificent, you can travel along a street with all nine housing styles on our brand new interactive. http://heritage.vic.gov.au/Heritage-places-objects/What-house-is-that/interactive.html
Choose a house to visit, and enter through the front door to reveal the stories, history, photos, video, interviews, features, floor plans, architect profiles of that housing style.
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Can anybody tell me when the domestic heritage overlays for suburban precincts were first introduced
Good question Rod. I’m going to pass this on to our registration team who might know.
Best regards
Jennifer Dawson
Hello Rod
The first residential heritage precinct in Melbourne was St James Park Hawthorn, where heritage controls were introduced in 1980. It wasn’t called a Heritage Overlay back then (the term “Heritage Overlay” was only introduced in the 1990s). It was called an “Urban Conservation Residential Zone No 1″. There are subtle differences between Zone type heritage controls and Overlay type controls but this is, perhaps, semantics.
The first retail heritage precinct in the suburbs to be protected was the Maling Road shops in Canterbury. An “Urban Conservation Business Zone” was introduced for Maling Road in 1982. The residential area adjacent to the Maling Road shops became Melbourne’s second residential heritage precinct. It was designated an “Urban Conservation Residential Zone” in 1982.
In 1982, the Cain Labor Government was elected and amended the Town and Country Planning Act to clarify the issue of planning compensation which was seen to be a barrier to the application of conservation controls. With the Act amended, a major planning scheme amendment was exhibited to introduce “Urban Conservation Areas” in nine metropolitan councils. Amendment 224 proposed “Urban Conservation Areas” over many hundreds of properties in the cities of Melbourne, Richmond, St Kilda, Prahran, Fitzroy, Brunswick, Williamstown, South Melbourne and Port Melbourne. It was introduced in the form of an interim control in 1983 and was made permanent in 1984. “Urban Conservation Areas” were Overlay controls (unlike St James Park and Maling Road which were Zone controls).
In the mid 1990s, the effort was made to standardise planning schemes to avoid the plethora of zones and overlays that had arisen. The “Heritage Overlay” became available from the mid 1990s and is now the statewide standard heritage control. It replaced “Urban Conservation Residential Zones”, “Urban Conservation Areas” and various other heritage zones and overlays that were in use.