Written by Peter Wilmoth.

The Imperial Hotel at 522 Chapel Street, South Yarra is a Victorian Italianate-style corner hotel in Chapel Street, South Yarra.

It was built in 1876 with William Fuller as licensee for the first year. The hotel has been heavily altered by the removal of most of the Chapel Street facade and enlargement of window openings on the side elevation.

The Imperial Hotel was designed by architect Joseph Thomas Crook and its longest serving publican was Hugh McPherson who ran the pub for at least 20 years in the early part of the 20th century. Its original address was 83 Chapel Street.

The Imperial sits on one of Melbourne’s most famous streets, named for the Independent (Congregationalist) Chapel which stood near Commercial Road in the late 1840s, for two years the only place of worship in the district.

Chapel Street is of architectural, historical and social significance. As a Heritage Victoria report noted in 2012: “Chapel Street is one of the most important shopping strips in Victoria. Most of its buildings date from one of three periods: its initial surge of development in the 1860s; the 1880s and 1890s after the development of the cable tram routes in Chapel Street and its cross streets; or from the emporium development stage of 1900-15.”

With its many inns and pubs opening in the 18th century the street even back then was a magnet for Melbournians as it has been ever since.

Inns or hotels played an important role in the late 1800s as social hubs. They were usually the first commercial buildings to appear in nearby Prahran’s early settlements and were typically built on the main tracks and at crossroads to provide accommodation and refreshment for travellers, we learn from the City of Stonnington’s Heritage Citation report of 2010.

The report tells us that hotels became important meeting places and centres of social life for local communities and that by the 1850s there were more than 20 hotels in Prahran. Many were small pubs offering refreshments to local workers at the end of a hard day’s labour.

Thirty years later there more significantly mire pubs in South Yarra and Prahran and they were playing an even greater social role. The City of Stonnington’s Heritage Citation report tells us the number of hotels in Prahran grew to over 50 at the height of the 1880s land boom and the prosperity of the age enabled many publicans to enlarge and improve their hotels.

Amid the grand, ornate buildings emerging at this time – such as the Exhibition Building built in 1880 – the increasingly ubiquitous corner pub remained an important part of working-class social life through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Most of the surviving pre-boom inns and hotels in South Yarra and Prahran were remodelled and enlarged with rear and upper storey extensions, billiard rooms, repainting and decorative embellishments.

In ‘Walking Tour of South Yarra central” by Betty Malone and Oscar L. Slater (1988), we learn that the street in which The Imperial sits – Palermo Street – was named after Cunningham’s Palermo Estate, a large dairy farm that lay beyond the Chapel Street allotments to the east.

It tells us: “Its swamp and quicksands, when drained in the 1870s, gave way to narrow streets and worker’s cottages. On the north corner of Palermo Street is The Imperial Hotel, with its balustered parapet and decorative central pediment.”

The Imperial had its challenges over the years, much of it because of flooding. Even though the pub was built on higher ground it was often under threat of deluge in wet weather.

In 1891 it is likely the owners were nervous. Non-stop rain over a weekend saw the Yarra break its bank and flood surrounding suburbs, leaving thousands homeless and people rowing in the streets.

Until effective drainage was established, Prahran has had a poor history of floods. The street drain outside The Imperial was too small to accommodate a lot of water and the hotel cellar was often inundated, as anxious letters from the licensee to the local council in the early 1889s demonstrate.

It’s not just letters that tell this story. There is an astonishing black and white photograph which was made into a postcard depicting flooded railway tracks with a train passing under the bridge that crosses Chapel Street, near Arthur Street and Palermo Street. The Imperial Hotel is visible on the corner of Chapel and Palermo Streets.

Another photo, this one published in The Herald on 23 November 1935, depicts the verandah of The Imperial after a car had smashed into it. “Swerving to avoid a milk cart at the corner of Chapel Street and Palermo Street, South Yarra shortly after 5am today, a double-seater car swung onto the footpath and crashed into a verandah outside The Imperial Hotel…. The verandah was wrecked.”

The recession of the 1890s slowed trade and halted development, but by then Chapel Street and its pubs, including The Imperial Hotel, were well established.

Known today as a street famous for its fashion and food, Chapel Street became a major shopping centre in the 1880s.

It was a time of growth and optimism. The land boom of the 1880s had brought great and rapid growth.

Melbourne in the 1880s was undergoing spectacular success, and with its wealth after the gold rush of the 1850s and as more magnificent buildings graced the city the nickname “Marvellous Melbourne” was coined.

Larger and more impressive shops were built in Chapel Street, as well as the means for customers to get there.

Trams first ran along Chapel Street in 1888, 12 years after The Imperial opened. The tram line would have increased traffic to Chapel Street and to The Imperial Hotel as well, as the street grew to become a retail and hospitality hub.

A Heritage Victoria Chapel Heritage Citation in 2012 notes the street’s significance. “Chapel Street is historically significant as one of the most impressive of the shopping strips that developed along Melbourne’s cable tram routes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,” it says.

“It is a reflection of the importance of the public transport networks, that developed in Melbourne in the second half of the nineteenth century, to the growth of the suburban shopping strips. The early development of the strip remains legible through modest shops, particularly in Windsor, and later, often more substantial and more highly-decorated, boom period buildings which survive throughout the strip.”

The Imperial Hotel, now popular for new generations, will remain an important part of the history of Chapel Street, South Yarra, as it developed in the 1880s.