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FORMER QUEENS ARMS HOTEL

Location 330-334 DORCAS STREET SOUTH MELBOURNE, PORT PHILLIP CITY File Number 601655 Level Registered

[1/3] FORMER QUEENS ARMS HOTEL SOHE [2/3] 1 former queen anne hotel [3/3] H1827 H1827 plan

Statement of Significance

What is significant?
The former Queens Arms Hotel was built for owner-occupier James O’Brien in 1854. The architect is not known. It is a two-storeyed rendered brick building with eight rooms and bars with the main ‘pub’ entry door on a splayed corner. The hip roof, now clad with corrugated roofing sheets to Dorcas and Coote Streets, was originally all clad with slate. Fronting the two streets are original or early large windows to either side of the splayed corner and a shop front window. The rendered facades are free of ornament other than the fine cornice beneath the gutter line. The first floor features cast iron balconettes, bracketed underneath, with the French windows opening on to them. The attached shop, which was incorporated into the building when it was built matches the detailing of the hotel section of the building. The hotel was delicenced in 1883.

How is it significant?
The former Queens Arms Hotel is of architectural and historical significance to the State of Victoria.

Why is it significant?
The former Queens Arms Hotel is architecturally significant as a distinctive and notably externally intact example of a smaller 1850s corner hotel and shop. The simplicity of the design is given a subtle elegance in its use of cast-iron balconettes, French windows and elliptical fanlight to the corner entry. This decorative treatment is unusual for a hotel of this type. The building retains original external fabric including the larger windows of what were originally the corner bar and the shop.

The former Queens Arms Hotel is historically significant as one of a small number of gold rush era buildings surviving in Melbourne. One of the first hotels built in South Melbourne, or Emerald Hill as it was then known, it is an interesting example of a purpose-built combined hotel and shop which was relatively common in the mid to late nineteenth century