The Fitzroy Town Hall was designed by George Raymond Johnson who also designed the North Melbourne Town Hall and the Meat Market.

The main hall of the Fitzroy Town Hall (1867) has a strongly theatrical mixture of flat floor, deep stage and surrounding galleries (which are now unable to be used, for legal reasons).

Another exciting performance space is the former reading room. With its chandeliers and columns, it is one of the finest and least known rooms in Fitzroy.

Fitzroy Town Hall is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register.

In 2010, the hall was the venue for a performance of Cities of the Mind, Martin Friedel’s extended cantata on the history of the mind and its science. In this performance constant changes of singer and instruments were used to relate its narratives.

Click here for an excerpt from this concert.

In 2006 the reading room was used as an intimate performing space for the mixture of visual and auditory, western and non-western, electronic and live materials of painter-composer Catherine Schieve.

Click here for an excerpt from this concert.

For 30 years, the concerts of Astra Chamber Music Society have ranged around Melbourne’s architectural environment. Each concert has had a site-specific design that takes advantage of the marvellous visual qualities, spatial possibilities, and acoustic personality of each building. The music, in turn, contributes a new quality to the perception of the buildings, now experienced by audiences as a sounding space - an area where cultural issues from music’s history are traversed, and new ideas in Australian composition are explored.

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