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.