A Beautiful Day on the Kingston Green
A few observations on why urbanisation in Canberra is a very good thing
It’s around noon on Saturday the 9th of January 2021, and I’m sitting on the edge of the Kingston Green at the corner of Eyre and Jardine street. It’s a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky, a gentle 20 degrees. The full weight of summer heat has not yet arrived, and flowers have lingered longer than they normally would have, the grass, leaves and shrubbery still a bright vibrant green from recent rains.
I am surrounded by the cheerful din of life. The sound of coffees hitting cafe tables, of a grandparent turning a newspaper, of toddlers running across the grass, of prams rolling across brick, of magpies crying in the trees, of the banjo busker across the street filling the square with soft music. A hundred muted conversations, between friends and family, between two dog walking strangers whose charges are getting acquainted, between a passerby and a religious evangelical on the corner. A father-son pair on e-scooters traverse the pedestrian crossing and park outside a cafe before joining their family inside, and the R6 bus rolls past a minute later.
This is the newest Canberra, a place where generations meet and overlay each other, where elderly long term residents share a coffee for a morning chat the table over from a group of recent APS graduates at a recovery brunch, meters away from a young family with two young children under five on a picnic blanket. I sit in the shade of a tree at least as old as my parents, but across the road there’s mere striplings, planted last year when the Eyre Street Market development opened, with its plethora of new cafes and restaurants.
On one side of the road there’s old kingston - fashion boutiques and landmark cafes, book shops and boot shops, with an heir of Chicken Gourmet directly facing the Otis Dining Room and the Essential Ingredient, the different ends of the culinary spectrum separated by 8 meters of tree lined road.
On the other side of Eyre street though is the newest Kingston, the shops brand new and some yet to open. A vietnamese place serves bahn mi next to a Japanese fusion cafe where you can get a flat white with your nori smashed avocado or chicken katsu curry. Further in, there’s the delightfully bougie Supabarn which seems to have taken upon itself to attempt to knock off Ainslie IGA as the cheese capital of Canberra, while also offering freshly baked pizza and barista coffee.
Above, the inhabitants of the overlooking apartments are just beginning to make them their own, adding plants and armchairs to their balconies, cosy nooks to sit outside and enjoy the ambient murmur of the square below.
This is Kingston in 2021, and life is very good indeed.
This is a post about urbanisation in Canberra, and why it’s a good thing. The scene which I described above was only possible because of the revitalisation of the old Kingston brought about by the increasing population density in the area, and the new shop fronts supermarket that the recently opened Eyre Street Market development.
The revitalisation of the Manuka-Kingston-Foreshore-Barton area has been a strictly good thing for those of us who live here, and Canberra more broadly. Even a year ago the Inner South had just one full sized supermarket, now it has two. I’m someone who enjoys coffee and bookshops, and now there’s more of both. Telopea and Bowen park both have far more people picnicking in them then they did when I was a kid, and that’s a good thing. Where once you had a handful of pubs to choose from, now the variety and range of watering holes leaves you spoiled for choice, from the devouring poutine and pints at Caribou to enjoying a cocktail in a darkwood booth at Queenies. Brodburger still reigns supreme as the burger venue of choice, but now it has a lot more competition.
Which is a shame because any attempt to build anything in this part of Canberra seems to have a determined opposition from local alliances of NIMBYs. It’s impossible to walk around Kingston without seeing some poster decrying some new development, and there are a range of local community organisations whose primary purpose seems to be as vehicles for a small number of locals to oppose further development.
Sometime I want to do a deeper dive on these organisations and the border politics of development, community representation and consultation in the ACT, but that would require a lot more research (and therefore time). For now on this beautiful day in this bustling square full of life, I just want to reflect on how life in the Inner south is good and getting better, and it is that way largely because of urbanisation and density — not by some cereberal argument or graphs and statistics, but a simple appreciation of the visceral pleasure of sitting in a place that feels alive.