Waiotira railway station, Waiotira, Northland, New Zealand

All photos (apart from one obvious exception) taken by me, April 2010.

Now, as much as I love slagging off hideous architecture, I don't want Mow Your Lawn! to get too bogged down in rants like the sort I just published about the Elizabeth Tower Hotel. So I thought I would fairly quickly follow it by showcasing the other side of the blog: the fascinating world of derelict and decaying man-made structures. Today's subject is the very decrepit Waiotira railway station in the middle of nowhere, lost somewhere in the rolling hills of the Northland region of New Zealand, a couple of hours out of Auckland.

The old back platform is in the foreground. If you can tell.

Waiotira station is located on the last section of the railway between Auckland and Whangarei to be opened. A rough-and-ready kind of freight service operated from 1923, but it wasn't until late 1925 that passenger trains began passing through here. But soon Waiotira was a railway junction, with a branch line leaving this station for Dargaville to the west. Between the mid-1940s and the mid-1960s, this was a busy station where trains from Auckland to Opua or Okaihau via Whangarei met local services that ran between Waiotira and Dargaville. It had two platforms, one for the main line and one for the Dargaville trains, a station building, and a busy goods yard. But that's all history.

Waiotira, June 1985. Credit: jeffpylenz; source.

Go to Waiotira today and try to imagine what it was like around 1950. Both railway lines are still open - just. They are on the brink of closure. As for the station itself? It's pretty eerie here in Waiotira really. It's hard to even get a sense of how this was once a busy junction, with passengers changing trains and goods being trans-shipped. Just look at that lonely platform; it's fading back into the landscape, covered by grass in an even more substantial way than Dargaville station. The only reason a train would stop here is so that locomotives on freight trains between Dargaville and Whangarei can swap ends. Passengers have not boarded regularly scheduled trains here since 1976, and the platform is now so overgrown and inaccessible that even a special excursion could not use it. It's hard to believe that even in June 1985, there was a decent-sized, well-painted, and not unattractive building sitting on that platform (see photo above right). If you told me nobody had set foot on it since that last regular service in 1976, I would have believed you.

The old goods yard, with Waiotira township behind.

The yard is basically a thing of the past. The main line and a short loop are still useable; a third track is in place but looked to me like it could no longer be used. The rest is gone. There are no facilities; the back platform has long since been taken up; there are certainly no wagons being dropped off or collected by passing trains. You have to use your imagination to recall a time when wagons were shunted busily, local produce was loaded, and much-needed supplies were dropped off. Waiotira was more than just a couple of hours away from Auckland in those days, and this station was a lifeline. Now, it's nothing. The only life is a signal protecting the branch to Dargaville. Even those tracks are losing their glimmer.

Well there's SOME platform surface left!

Like many country New Zealand towns, Waiotira nowadays is barely more than a dot on a map. There are just a few houses, and it's little wonder that the railway station building has not been preserved or that the station precinct has become so derelict and forgotten. It is, in a way, symbolic of how rural communities are fading away in many places. It shows how in this part of Northland, like so many other regions, being away from the State Highway and being stripped of your railway facilities one-by-one (first the expresses, then the slow passenger trains, then the freight) can be ... perhaps not a kiss of death, but a key part of the slow decline of rural areas.

Rating: Vacant, which I think translates to about Unpleasant on our oh-so-formal rating system.

Update: 377 Albion Street, Brunswick, VIC, Australia

Well, well. Remember the very first property we featured on this blog? Ah, the nostalgia. Well, we took a wander past it yesterday. Back in early February's entry, I suggested they could pick up a lawnmower cheaply from eBay or pay a local child an utter pittance of small change to make the lawn all nice and tidy. And what do you know? They actually have mown their lawn!

Here's the proof. Before (i.e. 18 January):

And after (i.e. 19 March):

No weeds, no spiders, no snakes.

Yes, it's a somewhat half-hearted attempts at lawn mowing, what with all those epic weeds still sprouting merrily, and I sure hope they didn't PAY for it, but it's a bloody good start. It's obviously not a lawn you could tackle in just one go by yourself anyway. I suppose they got sick of being unable to reach their front door; now the path is clear and nobody's going to accidentally step on a brood of vipers on their way out to the letterbox.

Now you can more readily see the front of the house and the somewhat rundown paintwork, which needs a clean at the least and possibly a nice new coat. I wonder, is somebody preparing this place to renovate or sell? Because it could be so gorgeous. Spruce up the front, get rid of all of those weeds, and plant a nice little front garden and it would look wonderful. This is proven by some nearby houses built to the same plan - they are stunning.

Rating: Revised down from Damnable to Unpleasant.

528 Albion Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

I would love to know what happened to this house, located on Albion Street almost at the point where Brunswick West becomes Essendon. Despite living not too far away from it, I only started walking past it regularly in late 2008; if I'd gone by before, I'd not noticed it - possibly because it hadn't yet suffered its fateful calamity. As you can see in this capture from Google Streetview (this area was done before April 2009, but I'm not sure how far before), it was once a very plain sort of place:

Aerial view from sometime before October 2010.

And now I'm just so curious. When I first remember laying eyes on it, it was the shell of a house. Its twin next door, seemingly a mirror image, is fine, structurally at least; its windows seem permanently sealed like a prison, but that's a rant for another time. This collection of walls with vacant windows, however, was just standing around forlornly, evidently showing the effects of fire. You can see what I mean in the Google Satellite screenshot at right. Compounding the fire damage was exposure to the elements, the streaks from the flames now joined by streaks from the rain. The "elements" in this neck of the world tend to end up including graffiti too, in this case some pretty scratchy and pissweak tagging. A wire fence was along the street frontage with a builder's sign, but it didn't look like much had happened in a while.

Then suddenly, I went past one day in the second half of 2010, and as you can see in my pictures - it had the skeleton of a roof! Some work seems to have gone on inside too, and the property was in general tidied up a bit. Then the mystery deepened: nothing has happened since and the property is becoming less orderly by the day. The skeletal roof is starting to cop the elements. The house looks more forlorn than ever; rather than a phoenix rising from the ashes, it's giving the impression of the ashes just moving around a bit.

Is this a sad case of an insurance company not paying up, or an educational lesson about the perils of not being insured? Is it a buyer or builder struggling for funds? Is this just renovations being carried out on a sort of geological timespan? Why didn't they just knock over the smouldering remnants and start anew? Well, I can at least answer the last question; it appears to have some sort of heritage protection. In my search for information here, hoping to come up with a relevant newspaper example, I found something mildly creepy - somebody died in this house. But not when it burnt down! As this births and deaths page from The Argus shows, a Margaret Spicer died here on 29 December 1945, with her funeral proceeding from this address to Fawkner Cemetery two days later. However, I can't seem to find any news about how Mrs Spicer's house ended up in this state over half a century later! My Google powers have failed me.

Rating: At present, condemnable! Before the fire? Lick o' paint. If it's ever fully rebuilt? I'll let you know!

60 Keilor Road, Essendon North, VIC, Australia

I don't really want to be seen as an architectural luddite, and nobody needs an architectural equivalent of those "rock music died in 1975!" people. There are some examples of older architecture I am by no means fond of, and they will end up on this blog sooner or later. However, so many of the new developments going up around Melbourne are decidedly unappealling, and many of the popular trends do a good job of raising my ire. Today's target is a good example of many silly ideas in small apartment blocks you can find in the inner and middle suburbs.

I honestly just feel like very few people are even trying now. This building has a number of nitpicks that together combine into a more substantial irritation.

Maybe it actually is structurally unsound.

Firstly and most significantly, THE SLANT. It doesn't have a roof as such, but the upper ceiling is on a slight lean. As are some bits on the side. Do they WANT to give the impression of poor structural integrity? Look, don't hint at the slant of a roof; build an actual damn roof rather than yet another flat-topped (or slightly-slanted-topped) building that resembles a shipping container more than it resembles somewhere people would actually want to live. I can think of few more substantial architectural sins than depriving a house of a nice, well-angled roof. At least if you go somewhere like Switzerland, winters tend to dictate a nice sloped roof, regardless of what else you do to the house.

Beyond that? Well, does the number need to be THAT gigantic? You'll never forget where you live, at least. OK, so that's really petty. However, I would like to point out the silliness of the balconies. On the side, where it's extremely difficult to see in, the balconies have railings (or walls) so gigantic that they actually look more like an electrical switchboard locker than somewhere to go chill outside. Meanwhile, up the front, where everybody on a busy road can merrily see in, you have low balcony railings to aid in that voyeuristic quest. Hmm, got that round the wrong way, huh!

I'd be selling up too. They forgot to mention that the building's hideous.

And in general, I find buildings like this to be monumentally unappealling. They're dime-a-dozen boxes with basic paintjobs that lack detail, just templates and bare surfaces slapped together to be functional rather than appealling. Once upon a time, buildings of any decent size were civic statements; now developers can't throw apartment blocks up fast enough, and anything that isn't absolutely necessary to its structural integrity is jettisoned as an "optional extra" rather than constructing a building that will actually age well and possess dignity decades down the track. And then that's compounded by the tokenistic attempts to try to airbrush away its cookie-cutter functionalism by placing a basic necessity at a slightly unusual angle to that it's A BIT different from everywhere else (i.e. giving the flat top a bit of a perplexing slant) or throwing off-cuts at the building instead of taking the effort to dump them (as in the case of the inexplicable poles at 7 Bent Street). You're not fooling anyone. We know you just want people to hurry the fuck up and move in so that you can move on to your next charmless, hastily designed and even more hastily erected money pit of apartments.

And yet it's probably got all the mod-cons inside and is very liveable. At least when you're inside, you don't have to look at it!

Rating: Unpleasant.

101 Waterfront Way (Melbourne Eye / Southern Star Observation Wheel), Docklands, VIC, Australia

LaTrobe St end of Docklands in March 2008; Melbourne Eye at hard right.

It's fair to say that a number of New Zealand cities have Australian equivalents.  Christchurch is a miniature Adelaide.  Auckland is a miniature Sydney.  And perhaps the reason why I took to Melbourne so merrily is because it's just Wellington writ large, but lacking any serious hills to climb.  They are both the cultural capitals of their respective countries.  They both have by far the most competent public transport of their respective countries (though that isn't saying much in either case).  Their dining precincts are unparalleled in any other city in their respective countries.  And after Wellington did an impeccable job converting its old wharves into a welcoming, vibrant waterfront precinct, Melbourne decided it had to replicate this idea.

Unfortunately, Melbourne didn't quite grasp the idea properly.  Anybody who has been to Docklands can attest to the fact that it can be a pretty sterile, lifeless area trying way too hard to attract ... well, it seems to want hordes of tourists and shoppers, but somewhat in contradiction it wants them to be a higher class of clientele, cashed up sorts who will blow heaps of money on impractical clothes and a meal that costs four times what you'd pay at a normal Melbourne restaurant but is only a quarter the size.  Of course, cashed up bogans dismiss Docklands as a hub of leftie yuppies, while actual lefties such as myself couldn't afford to live there even if we wanted to.  You see the dilemma.  So to help lure some more people in, the Southern Star observation wheel was built ... and that's when things got hilarious.

In our entry about Moonee Ponds Creek, you would have already seen this picture of the Southern Star from Railway Canal, taken during construction in April 2008:

Now if you thought "how'd the London Eye get into that picture?", I don't blame you.  No doubt most people have heard of the London Eye; a gigantic ferris wheel beside the Thames that affords spectacular views of the city.  Somebody decided there were enough people in Melbourne who'd also want to pay money to be taken from one place ... to exactly the same place.  Well, pretty much as soon as this thing was proposed for Melbourne a few years after the London Eye opened, the comparisons flowed in.  Can't we have original ideas?  Don't we look like such colonials for copying London?  So on and so forth; the unofficial name "Melbourne Eye" stuck much better than "Southern Star Observation Wheel", a downright stupid name.  Construction began in 2006, and after a couple of delays and inevitable snide comments by everybody, it opened in December 2008.

February 2009 from West Melbourne.

Hooray?  Not so fast.  In January 2009, just a month later, the Melbourne Eye closed.  That's right, after just a month in operation, it shut down.  The damn thing suffered buckling and cracks!  The operators tried to blame all of this on a rather severe heatwave (yes, as in that heatwave that gave us Black Saturday) ... it was later discovered to be a design fault, though I'm pretty sure any big-mouth pundit on the street was proclaiming that the moment the wheel closed.  This led to the most hilarious part of the saga: the wheel was taken down for repairs (or, so it seemed, for good) while the legs remain up to the present, clearly visible from the main highway and intercity railway lines into the city from the north.

Lonely legs in February 2010.

Cranes join the legs in January 2011.

Two years later, this erectile dysfunction has become something of the Melbourne answer to North Haverbrook's monorail, if you catch my drift.  "There ain't no observation wheel and there never was!"  Yet amazingly, reconstruction began last month!  Can't wait for the Melbourne Eye's next month of operation.  How about June-July 2012, then it closes because of a "harsh winter", aka more structural defects and revenue being markedly underwhelming?  After all, that's the crucial difference between London and Melbourne's Eyes: London put theirs beside major attractions in the middle of the city, while Melbourne parked theirs on the city fringe.  Beside the wheel, you have an area of urban renewal that most people don't really care about enough to visit, and a giant fucking railway yard (great for me but not so much for sane people).  Before you get through the reconstruction, folks, you might want to have a quick re-think about the wheel's location.

Rating: Unpleasant, in a hilarious way.  I'm sure it'll be fine once it's ready, but those lonesome legs haven't been a good look.

Footbridge over Citylink, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

One day, I headed out for a little stroll around some of the quieter suburban streets north of Albion Street. It was a bit of a dark day, with dark clouds threatening rain on the horizon. Everything was very still, and to be honest I was getting a little unnerved by it all. Imagine how I felt, then, when I followed a grassy little path and came out facing this.


This creepy creepy bridge runs from Peacock Street to McColl Street over Citylink. There is another bridge a little further south that is the same as the Head Bridge in every way except one. The crucial difference is that the Hope Street bridge doesn't have these CREEPY FUCKING HEADS. I inspected the bridge thoroughly and found absolutely no explanation for these heads. No artist name, no commemorative plaque, nothing. Just a whole lot of unnerving stone heads. They seems to all come from the same mould, so it's not like they're supposed to be statues of real people. Then again, I suppose this is for the best - I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't want to be immortalised in cracked stone on the walls of a slightly claustrophobic footbridge. This is a fate which I would only wish upon people like Tony Abbott and Justin Bieber, to name but two.

Now, I'm all for a little bit of artwork to liven up the city. I was frequently frustrated with the lack of artwork (or just nice features in general) in Auckland. However, I do not want to be confronted by cracked, blackened, expressionless stone heads when I'm going for an innocent suburban walk. These remind me forcibly of the way that hunters (and my friend Jamie) display deers' heads and the like over their fireplaces. Some of the heads look as though they've been burnt, and others have missing pieces - there's one which lacks a nose. Some of the heads have been defaced as well, which in most cases just adds to the eeriness. The drips of spraypaint on some of the heads make them look as though they're crying (or just emo kids without waterproof mascara).

I've searched far and wide for an explanation of this and have so far found nothing. Still, an explanation wouldn't stop this thing being creepy. I feel sorry for all the poor children who have probably been given nightmares from walking across this bridge. Actually that's a lie; I hate children. Still, this thing creeped the shit out of me, and I had to drag Ax down there as soon as possible to make him believe that I'd actually found such a thing. We went in the late evening, as most of these photos show, and it was even creepier that way. I guess this is what I get for walking down rape-y pathways by myself on dull days. Still, if it wasn't for insatiable curiosity, this blog wouldn't exist in the first place, and what a terrible thing that would be!

Rating: Unpleasant, both in design and in the feeling it gives you.

121 and 123 Dawson Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

121 and 123 Dawson Street, on the corner with Ferriman Street.

Remember my original post about horrid, soulless boxes around Melbourne?  It's about time that we featured another one of these miserable attempts at medium density housing.  Dawson Street in Brunswick West is home to a couple of adjacent examples, one of which has now fortunately been renovated to bring it kicking and screaming ... well, not into the 21st century, but at least a decade closer to the present than its forlorn neighbour.
 

Closer view of 123 Dawson Street.

Let's start, however, with 123 Dawson Street, which retains its original exterior.  I cannot fathom who designed this or why they thought anybody would want to live here.  How do you give directions to this place?  "Yeah, you turn onto Dawson Street, then I'm at number 123; just keep an eye out for the ugly orange brick place with no charm whatsoever."  Wherever you go, you're destined to spot eyesores along these lines, and I have to say they are the very low point of architecture.  Even your modern wanky bollocks with windows at funny angles, feature walls that look like they are plastered with mould, and an exterior painted the colour of mushrooms and despair are more appealing than this.

At least in the case of modern wank, somebody has put some effort into the design, however misguided that effort may be.  123 Dawson Street is functional and nothing more.  It's just four walls of the most plain variety with some windows in them.  Forget a proper roof.  Forget eaves.  Forget anything more than the barest essentials - four walls around you and a ceiling above.  Utterly thoughtless design for thoughtless developers who just wanted to throw up a block of flats as quickly as possible, cram in hapless sods, and make off with their money.

Closer view of 121 Dawson Street.

A few years ago, somebody recognised the folly of this design and renovated one of the two blocks - 121 Dawson Street.  Unfortunately, this turned out to be a fairly thoughtless renovation.  The walls were slapped with a new cladding, a bizarre "feature" was whacked around the upstairs middle window (straight from Pissweak Feature World), and ... that's about it.  Worst of all, it was painted the colour of mushrooms and despair!  Seriously, who paints their building so that it is reminiscent of a drizzly English day?  The renovator spent all this money on a renovation, and instead of using a tasteful colour scheme to highlight their work and make the place stand out, they have painted it so that it looks bland and sinks from view and memory immediately.  At least it looks about a decade younger than its neighbour now, so I guess the owner can fleece people for a higher rent on the basis of the most superficial work.  It's the rental equivalent of music companies charging you $30 for the "deluxe edition" of an album that normally retails for $18 but has a whopping one extra track and liner notes from a sufficiently sycophantic journalist or associate.

Rating: Unpleasant (121) / Damnable (123)

14A Bent Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

14A Bent Street is, quite simply, a mystery. For years, I had walked past it without paying it much attention at all. It was a pretty unremarkable house, really; plain, inoffensive, with nothing that made me stop in either admiration or disgust. Here it is, as seen on Google Streetview:

The reason why I have to resort to Streetview to show you this house is that it disappeared. After returning from a trip to New Zealand in May 2010, I discovered that it was GONE. It was as if it had never existed. All that was left was an empty lot.

Every time I went to New Zealand in 2010, I would return to find a building had disappeared. In the case of a house on Melville Road that vanished, it was one of those “wow, finally?” cases, and it lay as an empty lot for just a couple of months before development began. In the case of the Royal Dental Hospital of Melbourne, construction on a new cancer research facility began basically as soon as the dental hospital was gone.

But in the case of 14A Bent Street? Here we are well over half a year later, and the lot has very quickly been given over to nature. If you are ever curious just how quickly a city would be eaten by nature if humanity vanished, if you ever doubted The Day Of The Triffids and the like, then have a look at how quickly this lot has turned into uncontrolled scrub: 

(And check out the bonus ugly Walshe & Whitelock-esque flats in the background!)

They're going to have a fun time clearing that. I just feel for the neighbours – by this point, I'd start to worry about what may have made a home in there. Mow your lawn!

Rating: Unpleasant.

71 Melville Road (The Patra House), Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

This little charmer down the road from our house has fascinated me a whole lot more than it probably should. At a glance, there isn't much to it - it's a pretty ugly brick shoebox of a building, and if it were actually a house I'd probably just dismiss it with a "Walshe and Whitelock" sort of rating. As it stands, though, I'm not entirely sure what purpose this place serves. Most of the time the place is pretty uninviting - normally, the door is locked, the blinds are closed and there is nothing to indicate that the place is in use except the rather stern "members only" sign on the door. However, every now and then this place opens its doors to the world, causing much intrigue and confusion. Or maybe that's just in my case.

When I first came to Melbourne, about this time last year, this place had some interesting flags and posters up in the window, which have actually reappeared in the last few days. Last year, there was a flag hanging up which we're pretty sure was Romanian. At the time, we thought that perhaps this was a club for slightly nutty Romanian nationalists. It doesn't seem at all implausible given the high volume of immigrants around here. However, the very small morsels of information I can find on this place actually indicate that this place is home to something called the Patra Brotherhood, named in relation to the Patras region of Greece. Ok, Greeks make even more sense - lots of the shops around here, including many delicious bakeries, are owned by Greeks - but that doesn't explain the weird flag! Is it some kind of weird celebration of multiculturalism? Somehow I don't think so. To add to the mystery, one day we were driving past and we saw a pretty big group of what looked like protesters outside the place. They were holding up Italian flags. What kind of inner conflict is occurring between the Italian and Greek population of Brunswick West? And what do the Romanians have to do with it? It just gets more and more bizarre.

However, on a rather anticlimactic note, I think I'm being forced to admit that The Patra House might not be as suspicious as I originally thought. I've seen the doors open on Saturdays when they tend to hold their functions, and inside it just seems like any old club - there's a bar, a large seating area and lots of standing room, all clean and tidy but rather nondescript. Still, I would like to know exactly how you become a member - it's not like you can just waltz in and ask the friendly staff. If I was a Greek person new to Melbourne, I'd feel pretty intimidated.

All that aside, and going back to the essence of the blog, they could have at least tried harder with their clubhouse (or whatever this is). Surely they could decorate the outside, perhaps put some nicer blinds in the windows, and make their sign just a little bit more interesting and welcoming. And for heaven's sake, take down the irrelevant sign on the side of the building! It says "LP gas conversions and EFI specialists", which just makes me think of cartoons in which dodgy Mafia groups hang out in headquarters disguised as a "pet shop". I don't have a photo to show the incongruous sign, so I did a drawing instead. I'm very talented at drawing.

When it all boils down, I think this place needs to close for renovation before any members are admitted. It gives them a bad impression of Melbourne. We have many beautiful buildings to choose from - I'm sure that they could buy one of the abandoned shops around here and fix it up to be quite nice. But no, they picked one which looks like it used to be an abattoir. Try harder with your secret society headquarters!

Rating: Unpleasant.

1 Fitzgibbon Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

I spotted this one one day when I was coming home on the tram and was almost blinded by it. I thought it looked like somebody got a catering pack of tinfoil and just wrapped up their house, as if they were trying to keep it warm. However, further inspection shows that this house isn't actually finished - look inside and you can see that there are no interior walls. This has been sitting like this for over a year now, and there is no evidence of further construction in or around the house. This seems very odd to me - how can you get this far with a house, to the extent that you've got a proper roof on it and even a TV aerial, only to find that you can't quite finish it off? Did they just suddenly run out of money? Or perhaps it is lived in and finished, and walls just aren't as necessary as I thought they were.

We actually have a theory that this might be the Australian residence of conspiracy theorist and Muse frontman Matt Bellamy. He doesn't seem the type who would bother with walls, and it would make the silver foil exterior much more logical - Matt can't let the aliens get to him! But Christ, if anything, this is going to attract the aliens rather than scaring them off. Maybe the owners are simply trying reach the niche conspiracy theorist market. Because that totally exists and everything.

This tinfoil giant is attached to the perfectly normal (if in need of a lick o' paint) older house in front of it. I think that's very queer indeed - why attach another rather large house to yours in the first place (especially when you need to buy some paint for the existing one already), and if you're going do it, why not at least keep with the same style of house? I don't understand at all. As a charming finishing touch, it seems that recently some of the tinfoil on the side of the house has actually deteriorated and has been replaced with some tasteful black binliners. Lovely! Still, I think I prefer decorating your house with materials from the cleaning aisle of the supermarket than having a peeling weatherboard exterior. In case you haven't figured it out yet, I have quite a grudge against weatherboard houses that are anything less than immaculate.

Perhaps one day they'll finish this off. Until then, maybe I'll speed things up by supplying them with other useful building materials such as baking paper and catering-grade food wrap. Maybe they're just waiting for more binliners to arrive to serve as the interior walls. When that happens, the place will probably be featured in interior design magazines. It'd be better than most of the shite in those at the moment!

Rating: Truly bizarre, lying somewhere around Unpleasant.

29 Murray Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

There are literally hundreds of these horrid, soulless boxes around Melbourne, often sitting where some lovely old Victorian house used to be before a mindless developer with more greed than taste knocked it over. The reason why we feature this particular block of eight apartments (four single bedroom, four double bedroom) is because I used to live there and this shitbox deserves a right slagging.

Now here's the kicker: when I last checked in mid-2010, the shoeboxes that pose as single bedroom flats are being rented for almost $1,000 a month. That's right, a thousand bucks. Well over $200 a week. It is a horrendous rip-off, largely preying on two groups. First are poor students desperate for the cheapest flat within reasonable distance of university, especially international students who don't get even the protection of a government-supplied condom while being raped up the arse by course fees. The second group are lonely old people trying to live in the suburb they've known their whole life and can no longer afford the houses of their youth, so they'll settle for anything rather than move into a wholly unfamiliar (and probably equally soulless) el cheapo housing development in the outer suburbs.

That rental price is almost totally based on your proximity to the city – you're fairly handy to most things, so you'll spend all your time out away from the place and pay heaps of money basically for somewhere to put your bed, your toothbrush, and a bit of food. The building itself does nothing whatsoever to earn a cent of the asking price. It's an ugly and decaying brick box without a trace of character, nor for that matter anything vaguely resembling a proper roof.

Even better, the real estate agents, Walshe & Whitelock, hock off units here with brazen lies and gross distortions that are a stretch even for real estate agents. The last one I saw for lease was a crack-up. "Security entrance"? The front door's frame is warped, so the door's lock doesn't hold; the back door is never locked; and they gave up on fixing the carpark gate so it is always open. At right is the "secure" back door swinging on its hinges during the high winds of Black Saturday. "Kitchen/meals area"? Once you put in a couple of cabinets because there is no pantry and almost no bench space or cabinets, even a hobbit would be lucky to be able to fit in a chair, let alone a table for meals.

I have, of course, saved the worst for last. "Outdoor area"? None of the units so much as have a balcony! The other two claims may be total misrepresentations of the truth, but this claim is a blatant lie. The only outdoor area on the property is the communal carpark and a little alley with a washing line:

“Walshe & Whitelock” is now a by-word for crappy properties and they deserve their own category. They dabble mainly in the lower end of the market and they just do not care.  Try calling up their office if you are a current or prospective rental tenant and they'll talk down to you like you are a 15 year old shoplifter. But at least you don't have to have inspections. In all my years of dealing with them (thankfully well behind me), they never once inspected my apartment.

Rating: Unpleasant, perhaps Damnably so.

364 Albion Street, Brunswick West, VIC, Australia

Here is where the blog takes a bit of a bizarre turn. I am just as confused by this place today as I was the very first time I walked past it, and for very good reason. I mean, imagine it. You're just walking along an ordinary suburban street, with some lovely houses and few ramshackle ones, and all of a sudden you stumble across a localised forest. I reckon the owners could run a kind of safari on their roof - god knows what's living up there!

I have no idea how to explain this sudden influx of foliage. Underneath, you can see that it's a pretty bland place that would probably invoke a cry of "paint your house!" Still, it's not the worst house in the world. Are the owners really so embarrassed by it that they have to cover it in something resembling the Amazon rainforest? I know having a peeling weatherboard house is pretty humiliating, but even I wouldn't go this far. Or if I did, I'd at least get some nice flowers or something to cover it up. This just looks like something from The Day Of The Triffids. Clearly these people wanted gardens (yes, this enchanted woodland fantasy continues at the back of the house), and they weren't going to let the trifling fact that there aren't any gardens stop them. Or perhaps they're too stingy to get a nice hydroponic setup for their weed and are trying to get away with growing it on their roof. If this is so, they're succeeding so far! 

This is certainly one of the more inventive houses we've come across around here, but that still doesn't make it appealing. Please, keep your plants at ground level and just paint your goddamn house. It'll still be a an ugly house, but at least you won't get snakes dangling above your driveway anymore.

Mow your roof!

Rating: Unpleasant, in the most mysterious way possible.

Fire up your lawnmowers

Mow Your Lawn! is run by a Melbourne couple, which may or may not explain its geographic focus. After spending many suburban walks discussing the virtues and vices of the properties we passed, we thought it was about time we shared some of the worst offenders with the wider world. Now we don't mean to give the impression that we live in the middle of some kind of derelict slum - quite the opposite. An abundance of nice places have given us many ideas for the house we probably won't get to build for many years yet. However, dotted here and there through the neighbourhood like particularly persistent warts lie a number of properties which raise an inordinate number of questions. Does anybody live here? If so, how do they stand it? Is this a drug den? Was the architect both blind and mad?

What this blog is
This blog exists for the purpose of calling a spade a spade and a horrible house a horrible house. We mainly criticise buildings that have been poorly maintained, though architectural mis-steps are by no means omitted from our purview. I'd say that we don't mean to insult people's homes, but … that's actually the whole point, sorry.

Hey, that's my house!
Well, if you own it, then maybe you should do something about it. If you rent it, we know there may not be so much you can do (though if you're here for not mowing your lawn, MOW YOUR LAWN!), but your landlord should do something about it. Clearly your landlord sucks, eh? Though you probably didn't need us to tell you that.

Hey, I'm the landlord of that place!
So do something about it, you cheap prick. I know some landlords care about their tenants … I just haven't actually met one yet.

That's not a house!
Although our main focus is houses, we also feature shitty shops, office blocks, buildings of all descriptions – in fact any man-made structure. And Huntly. I recognise Huntly is just a force of nature for which nobody should be held responsible.

You snobby shits, looking down from your palatial mansion, why if I ever met you I'd-
Calm down. We have lived in at least two of the residences featured here.

It might be perfectly nice inside!
All the less reason for it to be so bad outside.

Care to explain your rating system?
It aims to strike a balance between clarity and precision:

Lick o' paint: Minor quibbles or sheer blandness. It's perfectly liveable, or if you were visiting you wouldn't be embarrassed to be seen there, but something could be done better.
Unpleasant: Whoever designed it or lives there should have known better. It's not outright offensive to the senses, and if you had no alternative you'd live or stay there with only minor qualms, but it really shouldn't be this bad in the first place.
Damnable: You'd rather not live or stay here, but it has redeeming features. If you bought it and did it up, it may look quite nice. Shame it's possibly condemned.
Condemnable: What the hell happened here? Whoever let this place get this way should be embarrassed. Let's just start again.
Cellar floor: Don't let the bottom of the barrel stop you.
Dot Dot Curve: We hope to god we never actually use this rating.

With that said and done, we invite you to come and join us on our charming suburban adventures. But watch your step, I think there might be some dry rot in the corner there.