FORMER CHARLES NAPIER HOTEL AND THEATRE SITE

The site is first mapped as 24, 25 and 26 of Section R on the 1857 Revised Town Plan of Main Street. The Charles Napier Hotel and Theatre and is one of the most well-known establishments in the Ballarat Gold Rush and is associated with the Ballarat Reform League and to have been a place where monster meetings occurred. The Hotel was established in 1854 and was destroyed in 1861 and was quickly rebuilt in brick and stone was a popular cultural institution of Ballarat. The Hotel was demolished in 1880 and the land was taken up by the Town Mission. Chinese classrooms and a Chinese Sunday School are known to have occupied the site until it was demolished in the 1950s. The place now contains residential housing. 

The site is of historical and archaeological significance. 

The site is of historical significance as the location of the Charlie Napier Hotel and its early association with the Ballarat Reform League. The site is known to have burnt completely in a fire of 1861, capping archaeological deposits. The site is historically significant as a late-nineteenth century hotel, theatre and brewery and later for its association with the Town Hall Mission and Chinese School. The site is of archaeological significance due to its potential to contain artefacts, deposits and features that relate to the establishment of Charles Napier hotel and theatre in the early gold rush, and later 19th-century hotel and mission activities.