Melbourne's bathing boxes
Brighton Beach
A single row of small wooden beach huts, each painted in its own bold design, on the bay south of Melbourne.
Why Brighton Beach is bathing-box red
Brighton is a suburb on Port Phillip Bay, south of central Melbourne. Along Dendy Street Beach stands a line of more than eighty wooden bathing boxes. Such huts were built from the late 19th century so that bathers could change clothes in private, as the manners of the time required. They are all the same size and shape, with timber frames, weatherboard walls and iron roofs, and none has electricity or running water. What differs is the paint. Each owner chooses a design: stripes, stars, the Australian flag, a kangaroo, a wave. The boxes are privately owned and change hands for very high prices. Behind them, across the bay, the towers of the city can be seen.
Values are fair approximations of what the eye sees there, not measurements.
Written by the Rang desk with AI assistance. Background: "Brighton, Victoria" on Wikipedia. If you know Brighton Beach and we have it wrong, tell us.
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The small pictures above come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences. Some are cropped to fit.
- Shekhawati In: Digrajsingh, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Kutch In: Zeel Satyendra Modi, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Uluru Au: Thomas Schoch, CC BY-SA 3.0, source
- Broome Au: Kat Clay, CC BY 2.0, source
- Hobart Au: Michael fromholtz, CC BY-SA 4.0, source
- Lake Hillier Au: Aussie Oc, CC BY-SA 4.0, source