Flinders Street Station

You are looking at the most recognised building in Melbourne. Flinders Street Station, with that famous yellow facade and those green copper domes, has been the beating heart of this city since eighteen fifty-four, when it became the first urban railway station in all of Australia. But here is the thing most people walk past without knowing: the upper floors are abandoned. There is a ballroom up there. An actual ballroom, sitting empty above Platform One since nineteen eighty-three, when the last dance was held. Before that, the Victorian Railways Institute ran a whole world up there for rail workers: a gym, a library, a billiards room, a fencing club, a debating society, and even a cat lovers club. There was a running track on the roof. An entire social universe, three storeys above the commuters, now gathering dust and peeling plaster.

The station you see now was completed in nineteen ten, designed by James Fawcett and H. P. C. Ashworth, who won a competition that drew over seventeen entries. Their design beat a rival proposal for a cathedral-like Gothic building. The famous clocks under the entrance dome, where Melburnians have been saying "I'll meet you under the clocks" for over a century, still show departure times for each suburban line. During World War Two, American soldiers in Melbourne adopted the phrase too. The station handles over ninety thousand passengers every weekday, making it the busiest in the Southern Hemisphere. And somewhere above all those commuters, a chandelier hangs in a ballroom that nobody dances in anymore. Artist Rone briefly opened it for an exhibition in twenty nineteen, and the queues stretched around the block. Everyone wanted to see what time had left behind.