Hoddle Grid

The Hoddle Grid is the contemporary name given to the approximately 1.61-by-0.80-kilometre (1.00 mi × 0.50 mi) grid of streets that form the central business district of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Bounded by Flinders Street, Spring Street, La Trobe Street, and Spencer Street, it lies at an angle to the rest of the Melbourne street grid, and so is easily recognisable. It is named after the surveyor Robert Hoddle, who marked it out in 1837 (to Lonsdale Street, extended to La Trobe Street the next year), based on the city grid established in the first survey of Melbourne conducted by Robert Russell in 1836, establishing the first formal town plan. This grid, laid out when there were only a few hundred settlers in Melbourne, became the nucleus for what is now a city of over five million people.

History

In 1835 John Batman and John Pascoe Fawkner organised rival groups of free settlers from Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania) to cross the Bass Strait and illegally settle on the site of what would become Melbourne. In response, the Imperial authority in London authorised William Lonsdale to lead a party to establish an official settlement the following year. As part of this Robert Russell was appointed as Surveyor and assigned Frederick Robert D'Arcy and William Wedge Darke as assistants. The grid of streets that is now central Melbourne was established by Robert Russell and his assistants while conducting the first survey of Melbourne in 1836, before Russell returned to Sydney in early 1837.

This grid layout was later adopted by surveyor Robert Hoddle when he arrived in early 1837 with New South Wales Governor Richard Bourke in order to continue survey of the area and regularise the fledgling unauthorised settlement. Robert Hoddle was the colony's surveyor when his plan of Melbourne was officially published, which led to the city design being dubbed the Hoddle Grid.