Kensington Market

Kensington Town Hall was built in 1901 for £6,000, to a design by Evander McIvor, who also drew the town halls at Brunswick and Flemington. Less than four years later the residents of Kensington and Flemington voted to amalgamate with the City of Melbourne, leaving the building a town hall for a municipality that no longer existed. It has been a dance hall, a wartime command post and a legal centre since. In 2015, after a $4.8 million restoration, it reopened, and Kensington Market started up inside it the same year.

Boutique, and it means it

The market describes itself as boutique, which here is a statement about scale and selection rather than price. It runs on the third Sunday of the month from 10am to 3pm, and the floor mixes fresh produce with designer fashion, ceramics, textile craft and an array of other visual work, with live music playing across the day. The organising team are volunteers, and the thing they optimise for is contact: makers standing behind their own work, able to explain it, rather than a wall of stalls selling the same imported stock.

Holding it indoors changes the experience in ways an outdoor market cannot match. The weather is irrelevant, the acoustics carry the live music instead of swallowing it, and a heritage hall gives small stalls a setting that flatters them. The market acknowledges the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people as Traditional Custodians of the land it trades on.

Good to know before you go

Bellair Street is Kensington's main shopping strip and the market sits right on it, a short walk from Kensington station, so this is a market you can reach without a car and should. Five hours is a generous window for a market this size, which means there is no need to arrive at opening; late morning is comfortable. Because everything is inside a single hall, a wet third Sunday in July is exactly as good a day to go as a clear one in November, and the market runs regardless.