Pity Footscray now it's on the global 'cool' suburbs list

It is, the article says, a melting pot of cultures from places as far-flung as Vietnam and Ethiopia, a place where you can scoop up a goat curry with fresh injera, slurp down pho and hunt out the best cannoli in town: it’s one of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods, and it’s right here in Melbourne.

Footscray has been named one of the 50 coolest neighbourhoods in the world.Credit: Darrian Traynor

No, it’s not Dandenong or Springvale or Point Cook – all neighbourhoods (we call them suburbs) where you can do these things. It’s not even Sunshine (although something tells me it will be Sunshine soon).

It’s Footscray, and it joins Time Out’s list of 49 other cool neighbourhoods, quartiers and suburbs in cities around the world, many of which you have probably never heard of.

There’s Wedding in Berlin, for example, where refugees from the rising rents in Kreuzberg are muscling in on the more affordable housing enjoyed by the traditional working class and migrant communities; Pilsen in Chicago, where waves of Latino immigrants who replaced the old Polish, German and Italian populations in the 1970s brought with them the taquerias that help make it so cool now; Peckham in London, which has gone from sitcom to superstar quicker than you can say “soft-shell tortilla”; and somewhere in Manchester called Ancoats, where old cotton mills have apparently been converted into co-working spaces, and craft beer has replaced warm pints of lager and a packet of crisps (hello, Collingwood).

And cool is no longer restricted to the developed world: Sao Paolo, Accra, Beirut, Lima and even Shenzen – the low-wage special economic zone across the border from Hong Kong where they make all the smartphones – have cool neighbourhoods, according to the list.

If you have never heard of Wedding or Pilsen or Ancoats, it’s safe to say few readers in those places have heard of Footscray, either.

And if you’re thinking, “Footscray, really?” that’s exactly the point.

Melburnians have long known what was attractive about Footscray (even if you didn’t live there), what makes it “interesting”, including the waves of migrants from all over the world launching their lives in Australia and bringing their culture with them (read: food); Footscray Market, where locals still resist the incursion of the big two supermarkets and the German interloper into their pantries; the ghosts of a working-class football team that until recently had only ever won one flag; and, of course, cheaper real estate than on the eastern side of the Maribyrnong.

If you didn’t live there, you could safely ignore the stuff that makes Footscray not so attractive: the way it’s separated from the city by Melbourne’s container port; the endless truck traffic on local streets; the dead zones of the commercial centre; and the badlands of factories and warehouses – unfit for conversion into co-working spaces – that hem it in on all sides.

Other Melbourne suburbs have similar attractions (minus the Bulldogs): that’s what large parts of Melbourne are like, east and west.

The multicultural mix is the gritty backdrop and melting-pot locals the colourful extras, but they’re not what gets a suburb on the cool neighbourhood list: that takes the sudden sprouting of craft beer bars, burgerias and taco joints in the vacant shopfronts of a neighbourhood hollowed out by globalisation.

This has been going on in Footscray for a while, but now it has made a list, Footscray must have reached the tipping point of gentrification: the future will be full of bland apartment developments, generic commercial spaces and rising rents.

The tide of global cooling will, sooner or later, swamp Footscray and dilute its appeal to the list-makers. Footscray will be old news, like Brunswick, and the tide will flow on, further west: next stop, presumably, Sunshine.

Matt Holden is a Melbourne writer.