My suburb lives in the shadows of Highpoint, but its strip shops are fighting back

Despite being home to Melbourne icons the Royal Show, Masterchef studios and the Maribyrnong River, Ascot Vale has a slight identity crisis.

The local Coles is called Flemington, businesses at the end of Union Road are in Moonee Ponds, and the 1860s train station is so hidden you wouldn’t know it exists (that loud rustling behind the trees is no cause for alarm – just a Craigieburn train arriving). It is where the edgy north-west (tasteful graffiti and a tattoo parlour) meets sedate suburbia.

The suburb stretches from Mt Alexander Road down to the banks of the Maribrynong River, but it used to be even larger. In the late 1990s, the council subdivided the area between Mount Alexander Road and the Tullamarine Freeway, and Ascot Vale spawned its very own spin-off suburb: Travancore. Many still call it Ascot Vale, on the assumption that too much Ascot Vale is barely enough.

The barometer of the suburb has always been the local shopping strip, Union Road, which is marketed as a “hidden treasure” of Melbourne. Long, with a tramline down the middle, ornamental streetlights, and some 19th century shopfronts, it is at the heart of Ascot Vale. It doesn’t really go anywhere, so it functions purely as a shopping street. Punctuated at one end by local favourite, the Union Hotel, it merges into Epsom Road at the other end.

It is healthy now, but for decades, Union Road’s retail ecosystem was threatened by the proximity of one of the city’s largest shopping centres – Highpoint – up the hill in Maribyrnong. It lured locals with the siren song of multi-level parking, food courts and undercover shopping.

Gradually, people started to come back to Union Road as newcomers renovated cottages with no parking spaces, rows of townhouses sprung up, and apartment-dwellers like myself rediscovered the pleasure of walking to the shops. Twenty years ago, Union Road was all about banks, dress shops and newsagents, with one coffee shop (they did a mean muggachino). Now it’s all bagels, mountain bikes and barbers, with a cafe every 50 metres, which seems to be the law in Melbourne. At least the library and the hardware store remain, along with the local landmark Telesonics shop (a museum-piece shopfront of old TVs and radios that has been there forever).

It was this idea of a local high street that enticed me to the area, together with a generous supply of ’70s-era walk-up flats nestled in the leafy streets. There are more and more grey-clad townhouses popping up, but the old apartment blocks still hold their own (it helps to like quarry tiles). They are part of the eclectic mix of housing that includes Californian bungalows, renovated single and double-fronted period cottages, brick houses and flats and post-war timber houses. Up on Rothwell Hill, elegant mansions overlook the city, a hint at the prosperity that once flowed into the district.

Heritage activist Adam Ford in front of an 1881 Ascot Vale home that was set to be razed to build three townhouses, in 2019.Credit: Chris Hopkins

When gold was discovered in the 1850s, Mount Alexander Road became the route to the goldfields. Shops and hotels sprung up to service those stopping on the way, and spilled down the hill into the vale, creating a vibrant community and financing some impressive buildings. As befits a suburb named after Ascot in England, Ascot Vale also had its own racecourse, where the public housing estate now sits.

Despite the endless jostle for parking spaces, the suburb wallows in public transport. The train line was originally built to take goods from the mills to the end of the line at Essendon, but does a suburb of 15,000 also need three tram lines and a stream of buses going round in circles? Meanwhile, further west, there are no trams, and sometimes no train station. People do need to get here, if only once a year, for the Royal Show. Of the thousands who flock here in September, most don’t see any of the suburb apart from the showgrounds on a busy main road.

Show pavilions have also been used to film TV shows like Ninja Warrior and Masterchef. It’s not Hollywood on the Maribyrnong, but it’s something.

Different migrant groups have settled here, but Ascot Vale is still not as diverse as it could be. There is community spirit, but also quite a lot of do-your-own-thing, as there is a significant population of singles and couples. Despite inflated house prices and ever-creeping trendiness, Ascot Vale still feels refreshingly down-to-earth. You can’t get too uppity in the west, regardless of how often a luxury SUV blocks your driveway. Outside perceptions have changed, too – it wasn’t that long ago I would tell people on the other side of town that I lived in Ascot Vale, and it would draw a blank. Now they say, “Ooh, great spot.”

And it is.

Suzanne Hemming is a Melbourne writer.

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