Take a walk through Yarra and explore our heritage walks.
View the Princes Hill heritage walk on Google Maps.
Download the Princes Hill heritage walk map [ PDF, 7.99 MB] .
This walk will take approximately 2.5 to 3 hours to complete. It covers a considerable distance, so you may prefer to walk sections separately.
About Princes Hill
The area we now call Princes Hill was part of the ancestral lands of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woi-worung tribe. Until the mid-1870s, the area was an open bush land. Between 1876 and 1879 the Victorian colonial government subdivided the Crown land between Melbourne General Cemetery and Pigdon Street. The street layout was established by government survey.
Wide streets and generous rear service lanes appeared in the subdivision, leaving little to the whims of developers. The main period of development of the area was from the late 1870s until the 1910s, which gave it a uniform streetscape of Victorian and Edwardian buildings.
Today we see a dominance of one-storey housing interspersed with two-storey buildings. Landscape elements such as the wide Pigdon Street boulevard and the adjoining Melbourne General Cemetery and Princes Park, enhance the spacious and period landscape character of the area.
There has been minimal commercial development in this area. Apart from a few traditional corner stores, most shops were developed in a strip along Lygon Street. Public and community buildings dating from the area’s early period of development include the Princes Hill Primary School in Pigdon Street, and St Michael’s Anglican Church and hall on the corner of McIlwraith and Macpherson Streets.