OLD SPIRITS, NEW CROWDS: OUR PUBS ARE CHANGING

The new wave of renovated pubs has old regulars drifting out on its tide. Can our local watering holes still foster a true sense of community?

Words by Charlie Gill

Illustrations by Marnie Florence

This feature was originally published in The Rotunda's April 2025 edition. The pdf is accessible via our home page.

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On the morning of November 4th 1887, a penniless young man named John F. Lewis made his way towards the Tramway Hotel, just off Brunswick Street, for a glass of ale. He sat there for several hours with the landlady, Mrs Breen, entrusting her with a diamond ring he didn’t think was safe in his possession. As a wine and spirit merchant, there was something tragically ironic about having to borrow sixpence from Mrs Breen to pay for his drink, which might partly explain his decision that evening, after returning to his lodgings on Gertrude Street, to cut his throat with a shaving razor. When he was found, “the head was literally nearly severed from the body”.

Mrs Breen is dead and gone now, too, but the Tramway is still standing. And while the tale of James F. Lewis was reported in The Argus the next day, our local pubs’ recent history resides only with the misfit cowboys who’ve frequented them for the past few decades. But now, these treasure chests of memory are packed with the young and affluent, and so the journey of their evolution is arriving at a dramatic crossroads: while second-generation gentrifiers are taking sips from fifteen-dollar pints, the dusty scallywags are migrating elsewhere. And they might be taking that treasure along with them.

On a sun-dappled table outside the Tramway, just off Brunswick Street, I meet Mark, whose eyes reflect the same discreet charm as the pub’s cobblestone-camouflage exterior. It makes sense. After immigrating from Ireland to Australia, this was the first local pub he fell in love with.

"One Sunday afternoon I came here and that was it, I was drinking here for 22 years. It was like walking into a country pub in the middle of the city,” he explains.

“You had immigrants like myself, Irish and Croatians. And Blackfellas, it was great to get to know them and the Koori culture. You also had a lot of country Victorians. A quiet guy came in one night, lifted his wifebeater and had two live snakes wrapped around his belly. Beautiful yellow snakes. Things like that used to happen.”

In the 1990s, the Tramway was run by an Irish family called the Rehills. Its matriarch, Bridie, would lock her husband in the cellar while he was changing kegs. Meanwhile, her adult sons would put tin buckets on their heads, jump on bikes and joust with pool cues at the roundabout opposite the pub.

It was also a big union hotel, frequented by a young Bill Shorten and former kingpins like Norm Gallagher of the BLF. “Norm drunk here with his minder, Lionel,” explains Mark. “He was stabbed 37 times in bed by his missus. Poor old Lionel, he was a nice guy.”

Mark becomes wistful. He had four relationships with women he met at the Tramway and had a child with one of them. “You could knock on the door at eight in the morning and get a whiskey. At night, if you drank too much, they’d throw you on a bed upstairs. But we stopped drinking here because they took Carlton Draught off, and moved to the Lord Newry.”

“In the 90s, it was the place to be,” Wayne, a local builder who’s been drinking in North Fitzroy for decades, tells me over the phone. A cosy joint on a quiet corner on Brunswick Street, once upon a time Wayne represented the Newry in pub cricket, used its jukebox nightly and convinced the bar manager to play community radio through its speakers.

And for a while, Mark and his crew joined in on the fun—until the bar manager was caught putting her mates’ footy tips in on a Monday for the matches the past weekend. “She was caught red-handed, and I was disgusted, so we fucked off,” he explains.

They ventured down Freeman Street to the Royal Oak on Nicholson, where an Irish woman named Alison was building a lovely community.

“We all looked after each other,” Mark tells me. Wayne, who frequented it as well, concurs: “There were a lot of old people who’d drink there. They had the TAB. You’d talk to them, and make sure if they won you’d walk them back, so they wouldn’t lose their money on the way home.”

But soon, the Royal Oak was shucked of its TAB machines like the rock oysters now on its menu. After Alison left, it was briefly a cocktail bar, before being put out of its misery and into the black by a savvy group with a stable of gastropubs throughout Melbourne. By the time the former sous chef at Vue du Monde had arrived to head up the kitchen, the rascal army was long gone.

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Georgie, a law student in her early-twenties, has grown up in North Fitzroy. We went to primary school together. Like me, she’s quietly tracked the metamorphosis of narcoleptic old venues like the North Fitzroy Arms.

“I remember walking past that pub as a twelve-year-old after school. There’d be lots of old tradies, lots of old men, and it was really kind of dingy.”

Given the Royal Oak had changed, the Arms was a natural safe harbour for Wayne—until the renovation: “Before, it was more of a community pub. There were a lot of ex-AFL footballers drinking there, a lot of scallywags… We turned back up after the renovations and it just wasn’t the same.”

“The first thing I noticed was the red tables and chairs at the front,” says Georgie.

Red tables like a matador’s cape, signalling in young bulls with septum piercings to match. The friendly yellow exterior was replaced by sexy black and egg-shell white. The website’s new design seemed studied and expensive. The food came Broadsheet-approved and the pool table no longer came free. Wayne wasn’t happy about it.

“I don’t like the young crowd. I think they’re rude, I think they’re privileged.”

But I thought I behaved perfectly civil during some light banter by the pool table with a diminutive sixty-something at the Labour in Vain last month. Looking at me with an empty smile and thousand-yard stare, he suddenly clenched his fist and threatened to break my jaw. So it can go both ways.

That said, higher drink prices and increasing cultural homogeneity have slowly been pushing out the stalwarts for decades. Mark describes an article about the Tramway that The Age ran in the early 2000s: “Someone was quoted saying, ‘It’s great, you’ve got rid of the stinky old guys’. We were just disgusted.”

Recently, on a busy night at the Arms, I watched the glinting sea of piercings part to make way for a drunken old regular careering towards our table. I’d gone to primary school with one of his kids and recognised him. He provocatively asked a new friend of mine—whose single earring hardly indicated androgyny—if he was a man or a woman. It felt like being mugged by a six-year-old, and my friend’s amused and almost sympathetic response was far more devastating than the off-hand callousness quoted in that article in The Age. There’d been a changing of the guard, and we all knew it.

“Now, it almost feels like in going to these pubs, a condition of entry is that you’re dressed in a certain way,” Georgie says. “It was interesting being at the Arms on Grand Final day. They still have all the old Fitzroy footy club photos on the wall. It’s so much fun and I love it, but it felt like there was a kind of disconnect.”

Wayne tempers his criticism: “Rude’s probably a harsh word. I just don’t know where the young people who frequent places like that get the money from.”

There’s nothing wrong with blowing hard-earned cash on a good time. It’s true, though, that frivolous spending can be cushioned by the peripheral knowledge of your parent’s assets—like a cyclist shadowed by a support vehicle. And it kind of puts North Fitzroy-lifers like Georgie and me in an awkward ideological position.

“It’s like, we’re the product of that gentrification,” says Georgie. “And now here we are criticising or lamenting it.”

The Brandon, in Carlton North, is a quiet pub with a reputation for not having a reputation. Andrew and Prue own the leasehold and live above it. “It’s like this little country pub in the city,” says Prue. “We have people who come in five nights a week. This place is very much a community…And whilst we’re seeing everything else change around us, it becomes almost the most important thing to maintain.”

“Each time something has changed in the area, there’s been somewhat of a follow on. When the Oak was closed for renovations, we picked up a few of their regulars. And the North Fitzroy Arms, too.”

“We know a lot about what’s going on in their lives,” says Andrew. “It’s almost like a second family of sorts.” But for some patrons it’s surely their first and only: for 16 years until recently, the Brandon has stayed open on Christmas Day, and the usual characters book every year.

“We’d roll the wheelie bin into the middle of the road and have a cricket match,” explains Andrew.

One of those Christmas Day regulars was our old friend Mark, and it’s no surprise why the Brandon appeals to him: “The most important thing for me, in a pub, is the publican. I like the publican to be behind the bar. I don’t like managed pubs. If they’re managed, they’ve got to be about money.”

(Management-style aside, Mark says certain pubs just don’t feel right—like the Parkview Hotel on St Georges Road. It’s currently closed for renovations, but Mark says “There’s something not quite right about it, it doesn’t matter what you do with it.” This isn’t anything new. On October 20th 1887, The Herald reported that two burglars entered at four in the morning, but “as there was nothing worth stealing in the bar the men made their way upstairs” and woke up an employee for a drink.)

Change, though, isn’t always a bad thing. Once upon a time, the Brandon was rough: “In the 1970s the cops raided the Brandon and found 27 fucking handguns from the customers,” says Mark. Andrew has some stories too: “There are stories of people getting shot outside, and the front bar being full and no one seeing anything.”

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The front bar full, and no one seeing anything. On Friday nights, when pubs like the North Fitzroy Arms turn into bustling playpens for energetic millennium babies, Georgie thinks the massive crowds hide a strange absence. Where are the regulars?

"That kind of presence you can’t manufacture. If it’s there you really feel it, and if not, you might not know it’s not there…like we don’t even know what we’re missing out on.”

Georgie once worked as a bartender at the Clyde, in Carlton. An old hand named Bruce would bring his harmonica along on the weekends and play the theme song of whichever team won the footy. Georgie got to know him and his mates well: “They’re not wealthy men, a few of them live in housing commission. And when I went to Europe in 2023, a few of them gave me $200 in cash. We became so close.”

There are economic factors, of course. Land taxes for landlords and other increasing expenses mean pricier pints for punters (or closures, which is what happened to the Gasometer on Smith Street last month). And so pubs get bought out, and with each new renovation comes a fresh exodus, and those kinds of friendships—transcending age, class and custom—become less likely to happen.

“That concept of community that we had in those days, mate, it’s all finished,” says Wayne.

And yet Mark and his crew have found a new home at the Lomond in Brunswick East, while Wayne’s drinking at the Fitzroy Bowls Club: “It’s a good gathering. There’s all these eclectic characters running around.” And when I drink at the Railway, on Nicholson Street—owned by the same couple for decades before being sold a few years ago to the Corner Group, which also manages the Corner and the Northcote Social Club—I feel like I see everyone I know. It isn’t the “old survivors of Melbourne’s underbelly, who’d sit around playing cards and barking orders for shandies in Italian” (as described to me by a former bartender who worked there in the early 2010s); it’s my very own Instagram generation, who gather in such numbers that the pub has to hire black-clad security guards to oversee the joint. When I asked a friend which local venue she was most likely to feel nostalgia for in 20 years, she said the Railway.

So these gentrified pubs can still foster community—just a different kind. Meanwhile, Mark reflects that the reason they rarely shut down is because they’re done up sometimes, and Andrew agrees: “The more they stay open the better, in whatever form they stay. It’s the heart and soul of Melbourne, pubs.”

But Prue makes a sobering point: “I don’t know if there’s that same sense of belonging from 20 or 30 year olds, that they see pubs as community for them. Possibly in the future, they’ll be less of a need for that sort of pub.”

It’s true. For my generation, pubs are more like the shared operations base for various strands of the same milieu. At the Railway, it feels like it’s only a matter of time before the crowd splinters off into a thousand different house parties. But for another kind of crowd, pubs are their worlds, and they roam the streets being pulled into the gravitational force of one or the other, in and out like the tide. The major consequence of the current trend of purchase and management was put to me most succinctly by a friend, standing outside the Royal Oak: “The only time we seem to come to pubs anymore is for events. I never pop in.”

And so that beautiful feeling of community is harder to come by. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In the middle of the roundabout opposite the Tramway are three monumental gum trees streaked with silvery-grey wisdom. I always assumed they were ancient—that the city had been built around them—but Mark follows my gaze and says, “Ah, the three sisters. I saw those get planted.” Maybe, now more than ever, we need to start planting seeds in places. Maybe we need to rewire our social lives into the fabric of venues themselves: find a local and treat it like family. These charismatic old pubs have entered our care just like James F. Lewis’ diamond ring was left in the grasp of patient Mrs Breen. And they can do as much for us as we can do for them.