Smith Street
Historic shopping strip straddling a suburb boundary, once home to Australia's first department store empire and its hidden underground tunnel.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Smith Street in Melbourne traces a sealed underground tunnel dug in 1911 by department-store magnate William Gibson, who built his Foy and Gibson empire across three blocks of Collingwood. You'll hear how the business split into stores on opposite sides of the street, and the problem that pushed Gibson to send shoppers below ground. It follows Gibson's 1882 arrival from Scotland and the empire's rise before its eventual sale in 1955.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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