Melbourne City Baths

This beautiful Edwardian Baroque building exists because the Yarra River was so disgustingly polluted in the eighteen fifties that people kept getting typhoid from swimming in it. The solution? Build them somewhere clean to bathe. The site was reserved for public baths in eighteen fifty, and Melbourne City Council opened the first City Baths on the ninth of January, eighteen sixty. The objective was literally to stop people from bathing in a river that was killing them.

Those first baths were leased to a private operator who let them fall apart so badly they were closed in eighteen ninety-nine. The building you see now was designed by J. J. Clark and his son E. J. Clark, built between nineteen oh three and nineteen oh four. It is one of the most significant examples of Edwardian civic architecture in Melbourne, combining red brick with cream-painted Baroque details. Inside, they provided two classes of facilities, because even bathing was stratified by wealth. Second-class cubicles with slipper baths were on the ground level. First-class baths were upstairs. There was a mikvah, a Jewish ritual bath, and Victorian-era Turkish baths. The first-class ladies' area with the mikvah has been retained as the modern spa.

Today the baths house two swimming pools, a spa, sauna, squash courts, and a gym. But the heritage bones are still there. The original tiles, the wrought iron, the high windows that flood the pool with natural light. Most Melburnians who swim here treat it as just another gym. They probably do not know they are doing laps in a building that was built because a river was too dangerous to swim in.