The new shopping centre opens today

Media item: newspaper article

Date published: 1 September 1932

This page records the media item. The original article is the property of its publisher and is not reproduced here.

This is the oldest item in this archive, and the only one contemporaneous with the building itself. It marks the opening of the Manchester Unity Building, 220 Collins Street, Melbourne — the building Smile Solutions occupies. Directions are on Location.

What opened that day

The Manchester Unity Building. Architect Marcus Barlow. Commissioned by the Manchester Unity Independent Order of Oddfellows, a friendly society, as its Victorian headquarters — Heritage Victoria records the building as designed "to meet the corporate needs of the Manchester Unity Group, a friendly society with 28,000 members in 1932".

The headline calls it a shopping centre, which is worth pausing on, because it tells you how the building was understood at the time. Not as an office tower with shops beneath — the retail was the announcement.

What that comprised:

• A through-block arcade at ground level, lined with shopfronts
• Retail below and above it, reached by escalator from the arcade
• Consulting suites and offices above
• The society's own headquarters within the building

Opening in 1932

The date is the remarkable part.

September 1932 was close to the deepest point of the Great Depression in Australia. Unemployment was at levels not seen before or since. Almost nothing was being built.

And into that, a mutual society opened one of the most ambitious commercial buildings in the city. The construction is remembered partly for the speed at which it was raised — how that was done is set out at The Manchester Unity Building — Costa Rolfe — and the project employed a substantial number of people at a moment when work was scarce.

It was, deliberately, a statement of solvency. A friendly society's entire product is the promise that it will still exist when a member falls ill. Building a landmark headquarters in the middle of an economic collapse made that argument in the most visible way available. See Party time to mark milestone for what friendly societies actually did, and Is dental really different to pharmacy? for how that question is argued now.

The escalator

The Manchester Unity Building was the first building in Victoria to have escalators, and in 1932 that was a genuine public attraction. People came to look at them and to ride them.

The purpose was commercial rather than novel. An escalator moves a continuous stream of people to another floor without the wait and the enclosure of a lift — which is precisely what makes retail above and below the street work. Stairs do not do it; a lift does not do it at volume. See Manchester Unity Building, Open House — part 2.

That decision is part of why there is a dental practice on Level 1 today. The building was designed on the assumption that the floors either side of the ground floor could carry ground-floor footfall. Getting there is covered at Contact Us.

Consulting rooms, from the beginning

220 Collins Street has housed medical and dental practitioners since it opened.

This was the pattern for a prestige city building in the 1930s. Consulting suites went into the upper floors of buildings that were close to public transport, in the professional quarter, and addressed well enough to reassure patients — and Collins Street was, and remains, Melbourne's medical and professional street.

The continuity is genuine rather than a marketing line. The building was designed with consulting suites in mind, and it still holds them — General Dentistry, Specialist Care and Our Team.

What a dental appointment was in 1932

Since the archive holds an item from that year, the comparison is worth making — and it is not nostalgic.

• Local anaesthetic existed and was in general use. That much would be recognisable. The modern version is at Dental phobia: how do you give a virtually pain-free injection?
• Radiography existed, at doses vastly higher than today's, with long exposures on film — see How safe are dental x-rays.
• Amalgam was the principal filling material. Tooth-coloured composite did not exist; adhesive dentistry — the ability to bond a material to a tooth — arrived decades later. Without it, cavities were cut to hold a filling mechanically, which meant removing sound tooth to create undercuts. See Tooth Fillings and Dental fillings: porcelain, amalgam or composite resin?
• Fluoride toothpaste did not exist, and community water fluoridation had not begun in Australia — the NHMRC records that the country's first program began in 1953, two decades after this building opened. These are, between them, the two most effective preventive measures in the history of dentistry — The benefits of fluoride and Fluoridated water: is it good for you?
• Antibiotics were not available. Penicillin was not in clinical use until the 1940s. A spreading dental infection was a genuinely life-threatening event with very little to offer against it. See Can a dental abscess affect your general health? and Emergency Dentistry.
• Root canal treatment was crude and often unsuccessful, so a tooth with a dead pulp usually came out — compare Root Canal and Everything you need to know about root canal treatment.
• Full clearance — extracting every tooth and fitting dentures — was common, and was sometimes given as a twenty-first birthday present. That is not a myth. The replacement options now are set out at Bridges, implants, or dentures for replacing missing teeth? and Dental Implants.
• Infection control as we understand it did not exist. The transformation came in the 1980s, driven by bloodborne virus transmission risk — Surgery Portfolio describes what a sterilisation room looks like now.

The single biggest difference is not equipment. It is that dentistry in 1932 was overwhelmingly about removing things, and modern dentistry is overwhelmingly about preventing the need to. Fluoride, adhesive materials and an understanding of decay as a preventable disease did that, not the chair or the light. See How do I prevent dental decay? and The stages of dental decay.

The other Manchester Unity Building pages in this archive

• Have a Deco at a Classic — origins, Marcus Barlow, the Chicago Tribune Tower influence, and faience
• Inside the Manchester Unity Building — the arcade, the escalator, the restoration, and how to reach the practice
• The Manchester Unity Building — Costa Rolfe — how it was built
• Party time to mark milestone — the Oddfellows, and how Australians paid for health care before Medicare
• Let there be light for Manchester Unity's brighter future — the illumination
• And the rest of the media record

Common questions

Was the escalator really the first in Melbourne?

Heritage Victoria's register entry goes further than that: "The Manchester Unity building was the first in Victoria to have escalators." It also records what they were for, which is the commercial point — "These provided access to the basement and the first floor directly from the main arcade entrance at Swanston Street", so the escalators were turning two extra floors into shopfront trading space, not just moving people. One of the originals survives: the building is listed as technically significant for "the surviving original Otis-Waygood escalator between the ground floor lobby and mezzanine". That is an unusual thing to still be running in a working city building in 2026.

What else was new about the building in 1932?

More than the escalators. Heritage Victoria records that it was "also one of the first Victorian buildings with automatic cooling, and rubbish and postal chutes on every floor", and that "Australia's largest diesel generator, located in the sub-basement, provided an emergency power supply." Of the three original lifts, "two of the three have been converted to automatic operation but the beautiful inlaid timber and panelled interiors to the lift cars have been retained." Taken together that is a building sold on its services as much as its address — which is exactly what a professional tenant, then as now, is buying.

Why would a newspaper make a fuss about one building opening?

Because of when it opened, and because Melbourne had been watching it go up all year. Heritage Victoria's history notes that "Newspapers carried regular reports the progress of the building, and a trip to the city to watch construction was a regular event for many Melbournians." The register then makes the larger claim: the building is "historically significant as the initiative that convinced Melbournians that the building slump caused by the Depression was almost over, such was the grand scale of the project and the speed at which building progressed." A newspaper covering the opening was covering a piece of public reassurance, not a retail launch.

Fluoride is mentioned above — when did Australia actually start fluoridating water?

Two decades after this building opened. The NHMRC records that "the first community water fluoridation program began in 1953 in Beaconsfield, Tasmania... followed by Yass, New South Wales in 1956", and that "Most large Australian cities have fluoridated their water since the 1960s and 1970s." The effect it reports is the reason the comparison above is not sentimental: "Compared to their parents' generation, Australians born after 1970 (when the majority of water fluoridation programs commenced in Australia) have about half the level of tooth decay." A patient walking into a 1932 consulting room had none of that behind them — The benefits of fluoride.

Practical details

Smile Solutions, Level 1, 220 Collins Street, Manchester Unity Building, Melbourne VIC 3000. Phone 13 13 96, or theteam@smilesolutions.com.au. Monday–Friday 8.00am–6.00pm, Saturday 8.30am–1.30pm, Sunday by appointment.

Every practitioner's registration can be verified free on the AHPRA public register at ahpra.gov.au, and the registrations held here are listed on Dentists & Registered Specialists.

This is an archive record of a published article and its date — not current clinical advice. The historical material above is general background rather than a summary of the item; the quoted heritage passages are from Heritage Victoria's Victorian Heritage Register record for the building, VHR H0411, held on the Victorian Heritage Database as place 728. The building is not a claim about clinical care. This is not a diagnosis or a treatment plan. Third-party published content is not reproduced.

Smile Solutions trades under ABN 28 193 514 103.