There is a 152 Elizabeth Street in Manhattan, which is the only building Tadao Ando has ever put up in New York.
There is also a 152 Elizabeth Street in Melbourne, which is a WeWork in a 1925 department store, nine and a half thousand miles away.
Same number, same street name, opposite hemispheres. This is the Australian one, and it turns out to be the more interesting building.
It is in the London Stores
The WeWork occupies six floors of what was built in 1925 as the London Stores, one of the great Melbourne department stores.
It was designed by H W and F B Tompkins in reinforced concrete and steel, and built right up to Melbourne’s height limit of the time, forty metres. The National Trust classified it in June 1994 and describes the style as cubic classical revival.
WeWork’s own marketing calls it Art Deco. That is a nice phrase and not what the heritage citation says.
It is a corner building, which is why it has three addresses in circulation: 152 Elizabeth Street, 345 Bourke Street in some of WeWork’s own metadata, and 349 to 357 Bourke Street in the heritage record. All one building. It faces the Melbourne GPO across Bourke Street Mall.
The department store was converted to mixed use in 2015 by The Buchan Group, adding seven retail and hospitality tenancies and a shell for a large coworking floor plate. The WeWork fit-out followed.
The opening
It launched on 9 November 2017, as WeWork’s first Melbourne location and its fourth in Australia.
It opened full. More than seven hundred members had already signed up before the doors went back. Private offices started at 730 dollars a month.
The interiors were by Sui Yao, with commissioned artwork from Georgia Hill, Mik Shida and FunSkull. Launch-day reporting dwelt on the open-air terrace, nitro cold-drip coffee and kombucha on tap, which dates the whole thing beautifully.
Why it survived the bankruptcy
This is the part people assume went badly, and it did not.
WeWork filed for Chapter 11 in New Jersey on 6 November 2023 and emerged on 30 May 2024. Around 160 of roughly 450 leases were cancelled and more than 170 renegotiated.
The critical detail is that locations outside the United States and Canada were not part of that filing. Australia ran its own separate lease renegotiation, announced complete in July 2024, which left fifteen Australian locations standing across Sydney, Melbourne, Perth and Brisbane.
Three Australian sites did close from August 2023: 66 King Street and 50 Miller Street in Sydney, and 260 Queen Street in Brisbane. No Melbourne location was among them.
152 Elizabeth Street is still trading. Its page carries current pricing, a tour booking and staffed hours of 8:30 to 5 on weekdays.
What it costs and what you get
- Private office from 490 Australian dollars a month on a twelve-month commitment
- Day pass from 60 dollars
- Meeting rooms from 59 dollars an hour
- All Access Basic 339 a month, or 289 on an annual plan
- All Access Plus 520 a month, or 442 annually
Offices run from one desk to a hundred. The building-specific amenities are an outdoor terrace, bike storage, a parents’ room, event space, showers, dog-friendly access and games. There is no parking, no wellness room and no barista.
On size, two figures circulate. WeWork says 46,166 square feet, about 4,290 square metres. Reporting from 2017 said five thousand square metres. Nobody has reconciled them.
The street it is on, which is built over a creek
Elizabeth Street is one of the nine main streets of the Hoddle Grid, the rectangle Robert Hoddle laid over central Melbourne in 1837 after Robert Russell had surveyed it the year before.
The grid was imposed on the landscape rather than fitted to it, and Elizabeth Street is where that decision shows. It sits near the middle of the grid, on the lowest ground, and it roughly follows the line of an existing gully.
Underneath it is Williams Creek, which once ran down this line into the Yarra and was progressively buried to give the street a dry surface. It now functions as the city’s main stormwater drain.
The creek has not forgotten. Elizabeth Street has flooded badly in 1882, 1972 and 2010.
The 1972 flood is the one Melbourne remembers. On the afternoon of Thursday 17 February a storm dropped a record 76 millimetres on the city centre in about an hour. Water on Elizabeth Street reached roughly a metre and a half, stranded trams, swept parked cars along the road and knocked people off their feet. The weather bureau described it afterwards as an ordinary but intense thunderstorm.
There was also a seasonal winter puddle near the Collins Street corner that locals nicknamed Lake Cashmore, and which was famous for ruining shoes.
Motorcycles, not bicycles
Elizabeth Street’s long retail identity is motorcycles. The first motorcycle shop on the street, and quite possibly in Australia, was opened by the Milledge Brothers in 1903.
Before that it was a coach stop for goldfields traffic and a gathering place for horsemen, which is a tidy progression. The street recruited riders for Victoria’s motorcycle regiment in the First World War, boomed after the Second, and housed the Motorcycle Riders Association headquarters in the early 1980s.
The other trade was cameras. Michaels Camera Video and Digital stood at the Lonsdale Street corner for 105 years, in a building the family had put up in 1916 as a pawnbroker and gunsmith. It became a pharmacy with a photographic sideline in 1928, and by 1976 photography was eighty per cent of turnover so the pharmacy closed. It won Australian Photographic Dealer of the Year three times. The shop closed permanently on Friday 8 January 2021 and the business moved online.
Getting there
Three tram routes run along Elizabeth Street: 19 to North Coburg, 57 to West Maribyrnong and 59 to Airport West. The 19 descends from a cable tram line opened in 1887 and has run via Elizabeth Street since 26 April 1936.
The terminus is opposite Flinders Street Station. From 152 Elizabeth Street it is about six minutes to Flinders Street and seven to Melbourne Central, and the Bourke Street Mall tram stop is across the road.
Frequently asked questions
Is the WeWork at 152 Elizabeth Street Melbourne still open?
Yes. It was not part of WeWork’s United States bankruptcy and survived the separate Australian lease renegotiation completed in July 2024.
What building is the Melbourne WeWork in?
The former London Stores, built in 1925 by H W and F B Tompkins, National Trust classified, on the corner of Elizabeth and Bourke Streets opposite the GPO.
Why does Elizabeth Street in Melbourne flood?
It was built along the line of Williams Creek, on the lowest ground in the city grid. The creek was buried and now serves as the main stormwater drain.
Is this the same Elizabeth Street as the one in New York?
No. They share a name and, by coincidence, the number 152. Melbourne’s is a city-grid street laid out in 1837. New York’s runs through Nolita, Little Italy and Chinatown. There are several more besides, in Sydney, Brisbane and Hobart.
A last thought
A coworking company that went spectacularly bankrupt is still running six floors of a 1925 department store, on a street that is really a buried creek, opposite a post office, where people used to buy motorcycles and cameras.
The creek is still down there. Every so often it comes back up to make the point.
