A planning expert has described as “strange” and “a missed opportunity”, a decision by Whittlesea council to give heritage protection to just two properties in the Peter Lalor estate.
Councillors last week voted to follow the directive of their own strategic planner to introduce a heritage overlay to two properties at 16 Gratwick Street and 18 Middleton Street, Lalor.
The decision concludes the council’s push, begun in June 2012, to apply a heritage overlay (amendment C157) to the most intact and significant houses in the Peter Lalor housing co-operative precinct.
Community concern initially forced the council to abandon its C157 amendment and seek community support for individual heritage overlays.
RMIT planning professor Michael Buxton is a leading expert in peri-urban growth (the area between the suburbs and countryside) and has more than a decade’s experience in government as a planning manager.
Told of the council’s decision to isolate just two houses for preservation, based on community feedback, he was shocked.
“If the estate is relatively intact and it reflects an historic set of values, it seems strange that the council wouldn’t apply the overlay to the entire estate,” he said.
“It’s either all in or none in.
“The attitudes of the owners should not be the primary consideration – if it’s of heritage value, it should be prioritised.”
The historical significance of the estate is its connection to the Peter Lalor Housing Co-operative Society, which was formed by ex-servicemen who built low-cost homes for themselves, using designs by renowned town planner Saxil Tuxen, during a housing shortage in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
Whittlesea council commissioned two studies into the estate’s significance, and both advocated for the site to be protected.
Annie MacKenzie’s husband was part of Peter Lalor’s home building co-operative and the couple built their house from scratch with the help of five other returned soldiers in the late 1940s.
Ms MacKenzie put her hand up to have a heritage overlay on her house in Middleton Street “so that people can’t pull it down and put mansions or dog boxes on it”.
The 90-year-old is the last of the estate’s original residents and remembers living in Lalor when you could walk to Reservoir and not pass a single house.
