High-rise v High Street: The battle for the soul of Thornbury

It’s no surprise to Marco Finanzio that some visitors to his Thornbury pasta and coffee bar, Umberto, say it has a Pellegrini’s vibe.

“My parents took us there regularly to eat with Sisto, Rocco and his wife, Maria, in the back room,” says Finanzio, referring, of course, to Melbourne-Italian hospo royalty, the late Sisto Malaspina and his co-proprietor of four-plus decades, Rocco Elice.

Finanzio grew up breathing the aroma of espresso and cigarette smoke at the buzzing Italian social clubs of Thornbury, where his Calabrian-immigrant dad, Umberto, took him and his brother as kids.

While Umberto played cards with his mates, the boys played pinball and drank cappuccinos. “Secondary smoke and too many Fantas before a quick trip to the TAB was a normal Saturday,” he says.

Like the formerly working-class suburb of Thornbury, his childhood was infused with the energy, food culture and cafe conviviality of the vast wave of Southern European migrants who settled there after World War II.

The young Finanzios went on their dad’s rounds as a sales rep for coffee and espresso machines, visiting the inner sanctums of classic Melbourne venues, “delivering coffee all over Melbourne, from the Jewish cake shops in Acland Street to the cafes of Lygon and Brunswick street”.

As an adult bored in his chosen career of finance, Marco decided to take his memories of how to give an authentic heartbeat to a hyper-local hospitality venue and apply them to Thornbury’s then-comparatively flat-lined food scene.

In 2010, he launched the espresso bar credited with kicking off the suburb’s cafe renaissance, naming it after his dad.

The way Finanzio and other locals tell it, when Umberto Espresso Bar opened in its original, 40-seat venue, Thornbury’s stretch of High Street was due for a bit of a rebirth. He describes it as faded by “decades of inactivity” between the 1980s and the late 2000s.

The bright lights of Northland and the growth in popularity of Preston Market had drained the vibrancy out of the retail spine running through this 5.2-square kilometre pocket of the city’s inner north.

Its lacklustre years did not escape the keen-eyed arbiters of all that is good to do in Melbourne, Broadsheet magazine.

They described the main attraction of High Street, pre-Umberto, as “dusty shops spruiking TV antennas, discounted shoes and second-hand whitegoods”, and credited the new cafe’s arrival with starting the area’s journey towards what is now “one of our favourite areas for a night out. It’s like a smaller, more relaxed Northcote, with much better carparking.”

Even as he made his business plan 15 years ago, Finanzio found reason to believe the little piece of the City of Darebin bordered by Northcote, Preston and two meandering creeks was destined for an energy boost.

“I uncovered a high-density growth corridor town planning approval for High Street, Thornbury. An up-and-coming area with high-growth prospects made sense to me,” Finanzio says.

The vertical expansion of this rectangular pocket identified in 2021 census as being home to just 19,005 residents was cemented last year by the Allan state government.

It announced a locally divisive plan to increase its Activity Centre Program by 50 more locations in well-connected areas, including substantial rezoning around High Street and St Georges Road in Thornbury.

This would allow development of apartment blocks of up to four storeys on single blocks and six on larger ones, with some potential to go up to eight and 12 storeys in an area loved for quiet streetscapes of Californian bungalows and period homes.

James Patto, a co-founder of the group, Fair Growth Thornbury, is among devoted residents who fear the plan has the potential to disrupt High Street’s “fine-grained” character by breaking it up with stretches of apartment block facades and car park ramps at street level.

Though, to be fair, many shops dotted between its magnetic new guard of food and drink venues – businesses such as Juju’s Deli, Porco Ciccio Roman-style pizza shop, Capers retro superstar Greek cafe/bar, Peaches bar and Casa Nata, home of Thornbury’s Insta-hot Portuguese tarts – are papered over, daubed with graffiti and already feel pretty impersonal.

Still, Patto believes the layout and limits of the place as it stands are working, precisely because modern apartment blocks have not yet saturated it. “Thornbury works so well because of its diversity, and that crosses social bounds, cultural bounds, it crosses demographic bounds,” he says.

“We have a long-standing migrant community, new arrivals, young families, singles. A lot of that comes from the diverse mix of housing across the suburb. A couple of streets off High Street, and you’re in a quiet, suburban neighbourhood.”

The existing variety of housing stock “allows people to stay in Thornbury across their life stages”, says Patto. Homogenising swaths of it with developments of one and two-bedroom apartments could erode this: “That kind of density often only works for specific life stages.”

While the more-gentrified suburb of Northcote enjoys good heritage protections, it is a sore point for Patto that Thornbury does not.

He worries that the human scale of Thornbury’s stretch of High Street, between Darebin Road and Miller/Dundas streets, may morph into the kind of generic landscape of contemporary Chapel Street and Toorak Road, South Yarra, where Patto believes the original, eclectic mix “is largely gone due to large-scale development”.

Fair Go Thornbury has proposed an alternative development map, exempting all residential streets to the east of High Street from rezoning, halving the amount to be re-zoned to the west of it, and removing all options for eight to 12-storey apartment blocks from the government’s current Thornbury Activity Centre plan.

The group says it is not against increasing housing stock in Thornbury per se, but argues the area’s domestic nature deserves to be preserved. Its proposed replacement map has been criticised by prominent pro-housing group, YIMBY Melbourne, claiming Fair Go Thornbury’s plan would lock newcomers out unfairly from well-serviced neighbourhoods.

Patto rejects this: “We are pushing as hard as we can as a group and a community to bring a place-based approach to density increase; to engage and listen to the community around the introduction of further density to the suburb.”

He suspects at least some of the many empty shops may have been land banked by owners with an eye to a rezoning windfall.

“We support increased density,” says Patto. “We just want to make sure it’s done in a way that respects the character and ensure Thornbury remains great for all those who come here.”

Ironically, Thornbury’s first housing boom was also triggered by its good transport connections to the CBD, seven kilometres away.

Having been originally surveyed on the lands of traditional owners the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as part of Robert Hoddle’s 1837 Melbourne grid, it only really took off in Melbourne’s land boom of the 1880s. This was triggered when it became apparent the railway from Collingwood to Whittlesea would pass through, via Preston.

The Darebin Libraries’ history of Thornbury dates the opening of the railway to 1889, and states that a cable tramway opened in 1890, running the length of High Street, from Northcote to the Preston border.

Settlement was sparse until 1904, when a direct train line from the city to Thornbury was linked by railway to Clifton Hill, establishing a faster route to Melbourne. Its proximity to town is high on the list of features fuelling the Thornbury development debate now.

One thing on which there appears to be consensus is that as younger people – possibly priced out of “more influencery” Northcote – had joined its older-generation residents, fuelling its day and night-life, the lifestyle on offer in Thornbury seems firmly in what Patto calls its “great” era.

Locals and visitors rave about its music, drinking and dining options in venues that sit alongside the remaining, old-school southern European clubs. They say a key feature and pole-star in the suburb’s socio-cultural map is their much-loved boutique cinema, the Thornbury Picture House.

It is the result of the visionary transformation of a 1920s garage into a seven-nights-a-week movie screening venue by Melbourne filmmaker Gus Berger, with his wife, Lou, a movie-music supervisor.

Berger, creator of the cult hit The Lost City of Melbourne, has a long interest in the historic cinemas of the city. He and Lou were so confident they could make the picture house on High Street work, they mortgaged their home to pay for the fitout in 2018.

Their single-screen cinema has developed a rusted-on following in just seven years, and Berger believes a reason for this is that Thornbury people tend to be “independent-minded and open-minded”. Like James Patto, he says they are also heavily community-focused, and adds that in keeping with this, business people in the area are supportive and collegiate.

“People are fiercely loyal in the area, and it definitely helps from a programming perspective that we can really push the envelope with our films, and show films that challenge people to think differently,” says Berger, who offers special rates for community screenings to support local groups.

“Music documentaries, in particular, are popular here.” A look at Melbourne’s gig guides confirms that as traditional music hot-spots, such as St Kilda, struggle to reboot a live scene that once drew people from all over town, Thornbury residents have reason to be proud of their vital culture scene. (Time Out also named High Street the “coolest street in the world” in 2024.)

The rejuvenated Thornbury Theatre is a thriving performance hub, as is the pumping Croxton Park Hotel (The Croc) – the fabled home to legendary performances from a roll-call of Australia’s rock music giants, as well as visiting big names and bleeding-edge indie acts.

Both venues regularly attract southsiders who deign to travel the whole length of Punt Road to get there, as does one of the city’s original – and most popular – craft beer outlets, Ben Carwyn’s eponymous Carwyn Cellars.

Carwyn Cellars’ success is another testament to the power of loyal residents to make new ventures they feel are worthy of embrace into institutions.

“This is an area that is very community-minded anyway, and we became a bit of a hub for it,” says Carwyn, who opened his original, beer-niche bottle shop with wife Nicole in High Street in 2007.

“We realise that unless people enjoy the experience, and that personal connection, it’s just another shop. I think [Carwyn Cellars] just became a community in itself.”

Carwyn feels Thornbury was a little overlooked as the rest of the inner north took off, but has become increasingly popular among younger folks as Northcote shifts upmarket. “Northcote lost a little bit of its soul for a while there, but I don’t think we have,” he says. “And I don’t think we will.”

Perhaps what appears to be a living connection between Thornbury past and present helps underpin what feels to the visitor like actual Thornbury pride.

The hip new pizza-by-the-slice joint Porco Ciccio, embodies this unbroken line. Co-proprietor Julian Mancuso cut his hospo teeth working for Marco Finanzio and Umberto – his own dad, a stainless-steel fabricator, built many of the original commercial kitchens of Thornbury.

Porco is housed in the original High Street shopfront used by Umberto’s, after its popularity recently propelled it across the road to a bigger venue formerly occupied by the 100-year-old Arthur’s Shoes.

Mancuso and his business partner built up their following by turning their refurbishment into Instagram stories, and since it opened late last year, every day their pizza sells out. For him, the Italian heritage of the area is very much alive.

“There’s still a good mixture of old Italians and new young Italian families making their way into the area; I see nonnas walking past in the street every day,” he says. Right on cue, an impeccably black-clad elder ambles by.

Just across the road, Umberto and Marco Finanzio are both also to be found most days, offering heart-felt hospitality in the old, Italian style.

Umberto thinks the secret to their success is, like Thornbury, that rather than trying too hard, the espresso bar sticks with who it is. “We are genuine. Not snobs … Not hipster but welcoming to everyone with warm and friendly service,” he says.

“We are a part of their lives, and they are a part of ours. Hospitality is all about the people and human connection. The food and wine is a disguise.”