The winds of change are coming to Hawthorn. Some welcome it, others are wary

For 17 years from the window of Alley Tunes, his record store and cafe next to Glenferrie railway station, Fabrice Lemoyne has watched Hawthorn slowly ebb and flow.

He’s looked on as foot traffic boomed, as the nearby Swinburne University grew from about 8000 higher education students when he arrived to 13,000 today. “Vinyl sells really well. And we sell a lot of coffee,” says Lemoyne as a line of customers await their brew.

Lemoyne watched on in 2020 as foot traffic disappeared overnight when the pandemic shut down in-person education for almost two years. He’s seen it slowly build back up, too. “It’s like Elizabeth Street here now.”

But Lemoyne is less impressed by one part of Hawthorn’s latest iteration – flooded by chain stores, bubble tea shops and sushi restaurants.

“Between the Lido cinema and stores like us, the independents are being swamped by franchises,” says Lemoyne, who took over the business in 2007. “The big chains are moving in.”

The retail is on the move for a reason: a demographic change is ever so slowly washing over Hawthorn.

This suburb was once the quintessential “old Melbourne” locale, with its many mansions set on gently undulating, tree-lined streets, some on the stunning banks of the Yarra River.

Just 3½ kilometres east of the city centre, the suburb’s natural beauty and its swish community facilities – including the Hawthorn Aquatic Centre and the arts centre in the old town hall – help explain Hawthorn’s wealth and its median house price of $2.77 million.

The last census also found life expectancy here was 86, three years longer than the rest of the nation. It’s richer, too: a typical Hawthorn resident takes home $1207 each week – a thumping $402 more than the national weekly average of $805.

Melbourne’s most expensive private schools also congregate in and around Hawthorn. Students from schools such as MLC, Scotch, Xavier and Ruyton come through the suburb daily, many via the No.16 tram that trundles up and down Glenferrie Road.

And yet according to those who know the suburb best, this is a place where the opulence of the past is diminishing as the times change and thousands more move into new apartments and townhouses built each year.

In 2001, apartments accounted for half of the 9100 homes in the suburb; the construction boom has seen that rise to 59 per cent of what is now almost 12,000 dwellings. Developers are attracted to the easy lifestyle sell of the suburb’s superb public transport – Hawthorn has six train stations either within the suburb or on its boundaries, along with five tram lines.

No one knows about the change coming to this suburb better than Monique Ryan, a Hawthorn resident for 16 years. Ryan won the once-safe Liberal seat of Kooyong in 2022 in one of the most seismic shifts in federal politics in decades. Hawthorn sits entirely within the federal seat of Kooyong and, as Ryan observed in her first speech in Canberra, “I am the first woman and the first independent to represent this electorate. I will not be the last.”

Over her years in Hawthorn, she has seen up close the sort of change that carried her into parliament. She credits its more diverse population in part to the growth of Swinburne. “But I think it’s also to do with the fact that so many young people have remained in the family home,” says Ryan, who is now pushing the Albanese government to do more on housing affordability.

Her own children, aged 20 and 22, still live at home – though she’s not complaining; more young people in the neighbourhood have helped make it more vibrant, she says. “My kids walk up to bars and restaurants around here every weekend. They stay in the area, or they go to the movies at the Lido.”

The Lido cinema reopened in 2015 after lying dormant for more than a decade. That reopening seems to have marked a turning point in the suburb’s return to a bustling and diverse activity centre.

Ryan in part credits the area’s change for her 2022 victory, and expects it to go on evolving as more medium-density housing is built.

One of those who helped Ryan win Kooyong is political strategist Kos Samaras, a former Labor deputy campaign director who says there is a real danger for the leader of the state Liberal Party and MP for the state seat of Hawthorn, John Pesutto, from this demographic change. Samaras says Pesutto will be lucky to retain his seat at the next state election. “And in the long term, he’s doomed.”

At 2022’s state election, Pesutto’s primary vote went backwards: he won 42.27 per cent of the primary vote compared to 43.89 per cent in 2018. By the 2026 state election, “a couple of thousand people aged between 18 and 24 will have moved into his seat”, Samaras says. “Every apartment that goes up should worry John Pesutto because the people that are moving into those apartments don’t vote for him.”

Pesutto agrees the area is changing but is upbeat when asked if he can hold his seat at the next state poll. “Like many other parts of our state, Hawthorn is a growing and evolving community that I am deeply honoured to represent,” he says. “I have never taken my local community for granted and am confident residents will support my team” in 2026.

Hawthorn’s beauty on the banks of the Yarra is what drew its first residents, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, to the area, spending their summer months by the thriving wetlands along the river. There, food grew so abundantly that it would sustain large groups of people, along with plentiful animals to hunt, and fish and eels to be pulled from the Yarra. During the winter months, according to the Hawthorn Historical Society, large celebrations would be staged on the hill now occupied by Xavier College, just over Hawthorn’s border in Kew.

After white settlement, the first cattle were pushed through the area in 1836. Hawthorn then became a suburb of social contrasts with humble brick-makers, labourers and market gardeners building homes there – only to be joined from the 1850s by the rich, building mansions to escape central Melbourne’s crowded streets.

Melissa Lowe has lived in the area for almost two decades and says that original diversity of wealth is today becoming more obvious. Lowe ran as a teal candidate in the state seat in 2022 and polled well, ultimately finishing third behind Labor’s John Kennedy (who this week told The Age he didn’t intend to run for the seat again).

“There are certainly expensive parts. There’s medium-density housing, high density and incredibly low density. And that means there are people with all different sorts of backgrounds, all different levels of wealth, and all different ages. It’s a really lovely mix.”

For many though, the spirit of Hawthorn is less summed up by cultural or economic diversity and more commonly found somewhere like Dobsons uniform store on Glenferrie Road. This Hawthorn institution opened its doors in 1918 and began selling to well-heeled Scotch College families in 1923.

But just down the street from Dobsons is 1st Product – a much more modern boutique clothing store, the likes of which few would associate with Hawthorn. Nik Angel says locals shop at 1st Product, but it has become a destination store because the brands he curates are hard to find elsewhere.

“We’re the only kind of boutique, specialised clothing store of this type in Glenferrie Road,” says Angel, who in his 14 years on the strip has seen it become largely a food strip. “I’d guess it’s 80 per cent food.”

That remake of Glenferrie Road has been driven in part by the boom of apartment development in the area.

Further up Glenferrie Road from 1st Product is another Hawthorn business, this one not yet a year old, that is part of a subtle new wave for the suburb. Ray’s Sandwich Deli opened last March, in what was once a short-lived home to a bakery and croissant store.

Owner Mariella Traina is a chef by trade who has worked in cafes for years, and whose passion for freshly sliced sandwiches and melts is unsurpassed. “We wanted to bring our love of sandwiches to Hawthorn,” says Traina, as the sun streams into her deli’s north-facing windows. “We’re an Italian sandwich deli, inspired by the sort of deli you might find in New York, but obviously, we’re in Australia, so we try to mix it up a little bit.”

Traina estimates about 60 per cent of her customers are young or middle-aged families. “Maybe 20 per cent [are] a little older, and the rest are young people.” Things get hectic at the store when Swinburne students are around. “There is change going on here,” says Traina. “Even since we’ve opened, we’re starting to see more and more young families stopping in for a sandwich.”

Traina lives with her wife in Hawthorn, and both love the neighbourhood. “We wanted to be in this suburb [but] we also felt like there was a demand for this sort of sandwich store in Hawthorn.”

The president of the traders’ association for Glenferrie Road is Sam Aldemir who has run De Barcelona, a restaurant on the strip, for the past decade. He also helps organise the annual Glenferrie Festival, which this month drew about 100,000 people. He says while Glenferrie Road has recovered from the pandemic, more people now come by car rather than walking or cycling.

And while food has become the predominant driver of visitors, “being a one-trick pony of just hospitality, that’s not a long-term sustainable strategy”, he warns. “I’m encouraging landlords to look beyond getting in another bubble tea business, which is popular at the moment.”

Aldemir is also wary of the chains opening along the strip. “The franchise businesses that come in, it’s good and bad because we need to have a point of difference, and not just [be the same] as Camberwell Junction or the shopping centres.”

Back at Alley Tunes, Lemoyne hopes the independent spirit his record store and cafe embodies isn’t a thing of the past in this changing suburb where he says “all of the big brands” are now setting up shop.

“Everybody thinks they can make a fortune from these kids from the uni,” says Lemoyne, who watches them pour daily into McDonald’s and KFC. “But you can have as many sushi shops or bubble tea as you want, but it doesn’t help with the sense of community.”

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