The Rose, Port Melbourne

When Pat Grainger wrote Chartered Scoundrels - A brief history of Port Melbourne hotels, she chose this picture to illustrate The Rose in Bay Street.

Established as the Rose and Crown Hotel in 1875, like so many Port pubs it was given a makeover in the 1930s to stave off closure by the authorities.

D F Cowell Ham designed the modernised building which was completed in 1939.

His facade is quite plain with most of the decoration of horizontal waves in the band along the stepped roofline. Perhaps in reference to the sea port location.

The central vertical element supports a flagpole allowing the pub to be identified among its similarily sized neighbours.

Those neighbouring buildings got a little shorter one hot October Sunday in 2007.

The gable of the building two doors down fell onto street below scattering bricks across the footpath. It brought the drinkers from The Rose and Chequers, across the road, to see what all the commotion was.

Luckily it didn't happen the following day when Bay Street would have been crowded with people.

Later that evening the Council closed the street and did a forced drop of the gable from the next door building to ensure it didn't fall at a later time. The photo above shows the second gable still in situ with the bricks lying on the footpath.

Not long after this, The Rose lost its dusky pink colouring and was repainted white and grey as shown below with its 'topless' neighbours.

You may also notice (click on the photo to see a bigger version) that although the pub is now known as The Rose, the vertical sign and the flag carry both a rose and a crown motif remembering the original Rose and Crown name.