Street of the Month: Pender Street, Thornbury

Pender Street runs east from High Street to Victoria Road, a little over a kilometre, crossing Archbold and St David on the way. It is one of Thornbury's longest residential streets and one of its least typical, and the reason for both is in the name.

Michael Pender bought 256 acres here at the Crown land sale of October 1839, paying 27 shillings an acre, and farmed it as Pender's Grove. His family held it until 1885, when the whole estate went to auction. The Pender's Grove Estate Company carved up the western end and advertised lots in 1887, Pender Street is named in those sale notices, with a £10 deposit and inside allotments going for a few pounds a foot. Then the boom ended. Sales stalled, and by 1895 the remaining 239 acres had passed to the Bank of Victoria.

What actually built the street was not speculation but policy. In 1906 the Closer Settlement Board bought the land at £100 an acre to provide low-cost homes for working families, and subdivision began in August 1907. Northcote Council objected at first, its councillors thought the housing would be inferior, then came around on terms: the Board would build the streets and drains, and the council would put up £1,000 for just over five acres of parkland. That is Penders Park, at 48A Pender Street, now carrying a heritage overlay in its own right for its corner gateways, its path layout and its mature Canary Island palms and silky oaks.

Houses came slowly. By 1909 only about eighteen had been built across the whole estate, most of them on Pender and Dundas Streets, and the population went from 95 in 1909 to 329 in 1911. So the oldest cottages here are Edwardian, with California bungalows filling the gaps through the 1920s and 30s. Number 76A is a good survivor of that second wave, an Art Deco facade on a deep 544 square metre block.

Then came the flats, and they are what make Pender Street unusual. Of roughly 186 dwellings on the street today, only 40 are houses. One hundred and twenty-six are units: cream and red brick walk-ups, mostly built through the 1960s and 70s on the generous Closer Settlement allotments, with a more recent layer of townhouses tucked in behind the old frontages. Very few streets this close to High Street have that ratio.

It shows in the prices. A one-bedroom apartment on Pender was asking $388,000 this spring; a three-bedroom townhouse at number 11 sold for $1.45 million in October last year. The houses sit in between and tend to come to market around the $1 million to $1.3 million mark, below Thornbury's house median of roughly $1.34 million, largely because the surviving cottages are small. Thornbury's three-bedroom house median sits at $1.36 million over the past twelve months.

And the tram. The street's western end is the High Street corner, which puts stop 41 at Blythe and Collins Streets about seventy metres away, under a minute. Walk from the Victoria Road end instead and you are looking at roughly fourteen minutes. It is the same street, but they are two different propositions, and the price per square metre knows it.

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