The West Beach Pavilion began its life in the 1920s as a change room for people across Melbourne heading to St Kilda for a swim.
A swim at West St Kilda was not the simple procedure it is today, as revealed in a fascinating document called ‘St Kilda by the Sea, Melbourne’s Premier Watering Place’, published in 1913.
The booklet, written at a time when conservative values were epitomised by the phrase “mixed bathing”, is a priceless social document, exhaustively noting the strict morality of the era and setting out some of the challenges faced by bathers in the years before the West Beach Pavilion was built.
St Kilda, the booklet noted, “is the most convenient waterside resort”, attracting people “for the purpose of bathing… It is a place for baths, promenades, gardens, pavilions, theatres, casinos and hotels” but “the beach is, and always will be, the distinctive feature”.
It went on: “Open sea bathing has always been in vogue at the watering places around the bay… but it is only within the past three years that it has assumed such proportions as to make mixed bathing during the holiday season an immensely popular pastime.”
So popular was the beach that “it is difficult to find even a square yard of sand unoccupied on a warm evening”.
But while “open sea bathing” was booming, municipal councils placed restrictions on bathers. “The South Melbourne Council has provided dressing sheds,” the book noted. “The St Kilda council simply enforces a regulation against loitering on the sands after bathing in bathing costumes.”
Unlike at South Melbourne, bathers at St Kilda had to climb into their swimwear “in the shelter of a cart, or a wall… because there is no shelter provided by the authorities.”
That took 16 years to change. In the 1920s three pavilions were built along the foreshore from Elwood to Albert Park. On 15 February 1929 the Prahran Telegraph carried a report under a headline “New Baths for St Kilda”. The baths, all completed within a month, were at Point Ormond, Beaconsfield Parade and west of Fitzroy Street”. That last structure is the only one remaining: West Beach Bathers Pavilion.
For many years it served its original purpose but as habits, mores and concepts of morality changed, so did the need for a change room on the beach.
By the 1960s its glory days were long past and the building had fallen into disrepair. The building was “decommissioned”. For years the building, unused, sat like an abandoned shell on the beach.
Thankfully, though, the heritage-protected West Beach Bathers Pavilion came in for some love and care in 2011 when its history was recognised and honoured with a meticulous renovation which conformed to strict heritage requirements and managed the challenges of exposure to the elements.
The pavilion now graces the beach at West St Kilda, providing a rare opportunity to enjoy a drink and a meal with your feet in the sand, or on the decking just above it, looking out over a patch of bush scrub and the sparkling waters of Port Phillip Bay.
The West Beach Pavilion – with its floor-to-ceiling windows and wide decks hugging the building – is again an important St Kilda gathering place, offering diners and those just wanting a coffee one of the great bayside locations.
A lot has changed in West St Kilda in the nearly 100 years since the Pavilion was built, but what hasn’t changed is its superb location, its extraordinary history and its role as a destination that captures the magic of St Kilda.
