The City is eager to protect many of the Victorian-era Miners’ Housing found within its boundaries.
Why are we doing a Victorian Miners’ Housing Heritage Study?
The City is eager to protect many of the Victorian-era Miners’ Housing found within its boundaries. These buildings, as a group, are significant to Bendigo’s gold mining history and are important in establishing a sense of place, history and home, all of which are invaluable to the community, new residents and visitors.
The grander and more ornate Victorian homes are mostly protected in the Heritage Overlay of the Planning Scheme, however, many of the more modest Victorian buildings associated with miners and workers residences, are not protected. This is because there either hasn’t been a heritage study undertaken in the area they are in, or because a completed study did not consider the more humble architectural form of the miners’ residences as being significant. Furthermore, these types of houses are scattered around the city, located around different mining sites and creeks, and so have been difficult to assess in a usual heritage study.
What are we doing as part of the study?
Each of the four types of Victorian Miners’ Housing are associated with distinct periods and laws related to mining and the associated houses that were built evolved to have different features, forms and styles. The protection of the four different types of Victorian Miner’s Housing is proposed to occur through applying what is called a ‘serial listing’ heritage overlay.
A serial listing heritage overlay identifies places that share a common history and significance but do not form a geographical grouping. Because we have identified four different types of Victorian Miners’ Housing, this warrants the identified places being included in one of four different serial listing heritage overlays - one for each of the four different types of Victorian Miners’ Housing.
A serial listing heritage overlay is the appropriate form of heritage protection because even though each of the four types of Victorian Miners’ Housing are geographically scattered around the City, they will have a single serial listing heritage overlay applied that identifies them as being of shared historical significance.