A monstrosity looms over my suburb. Yet, it’s hard to beat as the place to live

Driving out from the city along Canterbury Road, you know you’ve hit the middle of Surrey Hills when you cross Union Road and see the 45-metre-high communications tower looming on the hill ahead.

Built in 1961, the tower was made massive to carry heavy parabolic dishes, which focused UHF radio signals in all directions. The structure has irritated locals ever since.

By 2014, new technology would allow it to be replaced by a “slimline monopole”, which is exactly what Telstra wanted to do. Most nearby residents just wanted the damn thing gone, but then there were moves to have the tower heritage listed.

Municipal intrigue ensued and like the Eiffel Tower, built as a temporary entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, the Surrey Hills Communications Tower now seems here to stay, though without the pickpockets lurking to prey on tourists.

About 11 kilometres east of Melbourne’s CBD, Surrey Hills is a square, with a big chunk cut out of the north-east corner that is part of Mont Albert.

On the map, Surrey Hills’ boundaries are a combination of main roads, suburban streets, back fences and imaginary lines across railway tracks and car parks. Walking around the perimeter, it’s often unclear which side of the border you’re on. It doesn’t really matter. Surrey Hills’ quiet suburban vibe transcends mere lines on a map.

Surrey Hills, not to be confused with Sydney’s gritty inner-city cultural hub Surry Hills, is one of Melbourne’s leafy suburbs.

As a place to live, it’s hard to beat. For a start, you see the changing seasons more vividly. In winter, when the sun occasionally shines, it’s through the tracery of deciduous trees.

The bareness makes it easy to spot and appreciate the bird life, including “the royal family” of crimson rosellas that sometimes visit our bird feeder, along with thornbills, magpies, currawongs, wattlebirds, doves and mynas.

The downside of the vibrant autumn leaves is that tonnes of them have to be raked up to save the understory from suffocation. In years gone by, they’d be burnt in heaps by incendiary gardeners, but that is a thing of the past, along with the smell of coal gas that drifted over from the Colonial Gas Company gasworks on the corner of Whitehorse and Elgar roads. The pungent smell was a constant for nearly 80 years until 1969 when Melbourne converted to natural gas.

Large hedges are a common sight in Surrey Hills. Credit: Joe Armao

The smell of the gas and the smoke from the leaves are my childhood memories of driving through Surrey Hills from my parent’s house in Ringwood on trips to the city in our 1951 FX Holden. Burning the leaves looked like fun, but I couldn’t imagine living with the gas smell. Fortunately, when we moved here in 1993 from Heathmont, it had long gone.

Surrey Hills locals in search of a shopping strip, a coffee or a cafe meal are spoilt for choice. The massive works involved in moving the Mont Albert Road and Union Road level crossings last year were frightfully disruptive, but worth it. The Union Road strip is no longer bisected by a dangerous level crossing.

Like regulars of Sam Malone’s bar in the television show Cheers making their way in the world today, when we go out to shop, eat or have a coffee, we “wanna” go where everybody, or at least a few people, know our names. Mont Albert Village in Hamilton Street and the Maling Road shops in Canterbury, which are within walking distance, fill the bill for us.

As a bonus, the restored historic Mont Albert station building, relocated and landscaped on a paved and grassed platform above the lowered rail track, is a knockout. The Mont Albert Village Gardening Group, with more than 60 volunteers, is ensuring it remains an object of civic pride. Further towards the city, the very grand Union railway station is a big improvement on the dingy and now demolished Surrey Hills station.

When we came to live in our street all those years ago with school-age kids, our neighbours were a mix of young families and older couples. The mix hasn’t changed.

Back then, our street put on a spectacular display of Christmas lights. Neighbourhood gatherings celebrated events like Christmas, Easter, and those other semi-religious festivals, the AFL grand final and the Melbourne Cup. The party pace has slackened in recent years, but the street’s Christmas gathering has kept on, along with regular trivia quizzes and big birthday celebrations.

We’ve seen kids grow up in the street and return to visit their parents with partners and children of their own. These days, our friends and neighbours with young kids say how much they enjoy the social aspects of living in Surrey Hills – chatting with other parents at school drop-offs and pick-ups and at their kids’ sporting events. For all of us on walks around the neighbourhood, it’s customary to say hello to passers-by, a greeting almost always returned with a nod and a smile.

The neighbourhood streetscape we walk around has changed quite a bit in recent years. Many of the Edwardian villas, California bungalows, cream-brick veneers and walk-up flats that were built on greenfield sites throughout the 20th century are still here today, though they have usually been modernised and extended such that their builders and original owners would have trouble recognising them. Our house is one of those.

Our elderly neighbours back when we first came here recalled empty blocks scattered throughout the local streets into the 1950s. We similarly tell our younger neighbours about the old houses we remember, now demolished and replaced by new ones. Many are tasteful additions, and a couple are architecturally stunning. Some are McMansions and a few are even more over-scaled and overdone. But even with all the renovations and new builds, when you walk around Surrey Hills, you see and feel its history. I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to live here.

Lawrie Bradly is a long-time resident of Surrey Hills.

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