ABC News: Expert Commentary on the North Melbourne Public Housing Heritage Nomination

Dr James Lesh of Heritage Workshop was recently featured in an ABC Radio Melbourne News story regarding the Victorian Planning Minister’s intervention in the heritage process for the North Melbourne public housing estate.

Dr Lesh provided expert commentary on the significance of Melbourne’s postwar high-rise towers, noting that the current "knock down and rebuild" approach risks erasing a defining layer of the city's social and architectural history.

He highlighted the inconsistency in the current heritage register, which protects the experimental "prologue" and the low-rise "reaction" to this era, but leaves the towers themselves vulnerable.

"It makes no sense to entirely erase the era that defines them both," Dr Lesh stated. "The high-rise estates are the climax of that technical ambition and the catalyst for the social change that followed."

He further emphasised the importance of physical evidence in understanding the role of government, warning that without retention, "we lose all physical evidence of a time when the government took direct, ambitious responsibility for housing migrants and the socially disadvantaged."