The Corkman Irish Pub The Corkman Irish Pub

The Corkman Irish Pub was built in 1857 on the corner of Leicester St and Pelham St, Carlton.

Why not experience this unique authentic charming pub for yourself? Call in and see us for genuine Irish hospitality, Great food and drinks, the Craic, not a poker machine in sight and off course the friendliest staff in Melbourne.

Be greeted by charm with the entire Corkman Irish Pub team who pride themselves on service and quality, and who share interests from Music to football to lots of County fun!, depending on where you are from of course!.

There's a warm welcome for everyone!

Demolished

In October 2016, The Corkman Irish Pub was demolished by its owners without the relevant permits. The Corkman Irish Pub (previously Carlton Inn) had stood at the corner of Leicester and Pelham streets, Carlton for 159 years.

Heritage experts have demanded tougher penalties for developers who brazenly knock down historic buildings after the unlawful demolition.

Residents on Saturday night rang Melbourne City Council to complain about demolition noise from the pub, which the previous week had been partially burnt by fire .

By the time council inspectors arrived , the building had been largely demolished. The city council still issued a stop-work order to prevent further demolition, but a crew returned on Sunday to finish the job.

There was no demolition permit allowing the pub's destruction, nor was there a planning permit for a building to replace it.

'' This is a very, very serious matter - that building was protected by a heritage overlay,'' said Lord Mayor Robert Doyle. Hoarding had also been erected without permission on the footpath, he said.

A recent heritage assessment of the building, which was opposite University Square gardens and Melbourne University's law school, said it was one of the area's earliest existing buildings.

This appears to have mattered little to Stefce Kutlesovski and Raman Shaqiri, whose company 160 Leicester Pty Ltd paid $4.76 million for the pub last August.

Photos taken on Saturday show a company called Shaq Demolition and Excavation knocking down the pub. Mr Shaqiri was one of the owners of the now deregistered demolition company.

A man answering a mobile phone number for Shaq Demolition on Monday would not answer questions about the pub, and then hung up.

A heritage report for the property described the pub as having been '' of aesthetic significance as a good example of the Victorian period'' .

Melbourne City Council is now investigating the demolition and would, a spokeswoman said, '' take appropriate enforcement action'' .

Heritage consultant Rohan Storey said there needed to be '' hefty fines"issued against developers and property owners who carried out illegal demolition with no justification .

'' Hefty should mean of an amount that would make them think twice, and make it unprofitable ,'' Mr Storey said.

He said the building's owners should be ordered to rebuild the pub if that were possible.

Tristan Davies, president of activist group Melbourne Heritage Action , said Melbourne City Council needed to '' send a clear message that they are not going to accept this sort of thing'' .

On top of substantial fines , the site's owner '' should be directed to rebuild the facade - which has happened a few times in other parts of Melbourne, like Port Melbourne'' , Mr Davies said.

Pollster Gary Morgan, who is standing for lord mayor in council elections ending this week, said owners had '' knowingly"broken the law.

'' If I was elected mayor, I would put those people in jail. If they didn't get a conviction the first time, I would try a second time,'' he said.

Demolished

Melburians are outraged by the unlawful demolition of the building. While tougher penalities are obviously required to prevent this happening again, many want the owners to be severley penalised and made an example of.

Suggestions have included:

Fine ($massive)
No building permit for 10 years
Owners to fund a park or public space - Neil Mitchell 3AW

Pub wreckers linked to demolition of wrong house

The illegal destruction of a historic Carlton pub can be traced back to a development company with tens of millions of dollars worth of projects under way across Melbourne.

And one of the firm's companies, which appears to have knocked down the pub, had previously been sued by a property owner - because one of its sub-contractors demolished the wrong house.

Planning Minister Richard Wynne on Tuesday branded the company that wrecked the 159-year-old Leicester Street pub '' cavalier cowboy developers"who had acted '' reprehensibly'' .

And Robert Doyle said the razing of the historic pub on the weekend was '' the most brazen and wanton act of destructive vandalism that I have seen in my time as lord mayor'' .

Stefce Kutlesovski and Raman Shaqiri own the site where, until Sunday, the Corkman Irish Pub, formerly known as the Carlton Inn, had stood since 1857. The building was demolished without permission , despite it having a heritage overlay and no approved demolition or planning permits.

The pub was demolished by crews working with trucks and equipment labelled Shaq Demolition and Excavation, a company part-owned by Mr Shaqiri.

His company Shaq Industries Pty Ltd had previously been involved in a legal case in which the firm had been accused of partially demolishing the wrong house in Broadmeadows.

Title and company searches show Mr Kutlesovski and Mr Shaqiri are the owners of a company called Makshaq, which is building 8 Lygon, a nine-storey tower under construction at the corner of Brunswick Road and Lygon Street, East Brunswick.

Neither Mr Kutlesovski nor Mr Shaqiri could be contacted for comment on Tuesday about their projects or the demolition of the Corkman Irish Pub, despite attempts to reach them via their various companies, social media and their marketing agents Colliers International.

A fire that broke out at the Corkman Irish Pub a week before it was demolished is now being investigated by Victoria Police's arson squad. A police spokeswoman said the suspicious fire was under investigation by North Melbourne Crime Investigation Unit detectives.

Both the planning minister and the lord mayor went to the Carlton site on Tuesday where the remains of the destroyed pub now sit, and pledged to prosecute those responsible for knocking it down.

'' These developers have got a whole lot to answer for,'' Mr Wynne said. '' It's extraordinarily cavalier behaviour by a couple of cavalier developers.'' He said the state government would now consider increasing penalties for commercial developments.

Source The Age - OCTOBER 18 2016

Comment

The Corkman Irish Pub must be rebuilt to send a lesson

It's too late to save this historic building in Carlton. But it's not to late to rebuild, and to make reckless developers think again.
Karl Quinn | theage.com.au

There is a dark symmetry to The Corkman Irish Pub being demolished by "cowboy"developers in the same week that plans were revealed to restore the home of our most famous Irish-Australian bushranger.

While debate rages about what action should be taken against those responsible for the destruction of the two-storey 1859 brick hotel formerly known as the Carlton Inn, there is an answer of sorts in the plan to rebuild, stick by weathered stick, the 1860 house built for Ned Kelly's family in rural Beveridge.

Make the bastards rebuild it, brick by brick.

When they're done, they'll be free to apply for a permit to demolish it again. But because the building is in a heritage overlay area with protections against any significant alterations to historic buildings, they will almost certainly be knocked back.

Would it matter that it was no longer the original building that was being protected? Well, yes and no. It would clearly be preferable that the building had never been destroyed in the first place, but as the Kelly plan demonstrates, the notion of heritage can encompass reconstruction when that is the only viable option.

Should the developers be forced to rebuild - as urged by a petition online that has attracted more than 16,000 signatories - and should they then be denied a permit to demolish (again), they would be several million dollars poorer. More importantly, they would have no chance of reaping the profits that might flow from erecting a high-rise apartment block on their erstwhile vacant site.

Their folly would stand as a monument to all who might be tempted to similarly disregard our heritage and the law.

Shed no tears for the developers, Stefce Kutlesovski and Raman Shaqiri, or the Shaqiri-owned Shaq Demolition and Excavation, in this fantasy scenario. They must have known full well that they ought to have applied for a permit to demolish, and to have abided by the outcome - almost certainly negative. But according to the City of Melbourne, there is no evidence any permits were issued other than one for a road closure - which we now know was to facilitate the illegal demolition.

The developers have gone to ground since smashing the Corkman to rubble last weekend, but it seems likely they knew what they were doing.

The Corkman was not on the state register of heritage listed buildings, but it was protected by the City of Melbourne's Heritage Overlay for the precinct. According to the Heritage Council of Victoria, while these protections are not as great as for listed buildings, they are still significant.

Heritage overlay guidelines apply to "all fabric [of the relevant buildings] whether visible or not from the public realm". They do allow for the demolition of damaged parts of a building, on the proviso they be rebuilt in sympathetic fashion, but they argue strongly against gutting a building and keeping the exterior only.

A building "should normally be retained in its original three-dimensional form", the guidelines state. "Inadequate retention of fabric can result in Facadism and should be avoided."

Presumably, the demolisher-developers knew they were flouting these guidelines, knew the legal risks for doing so, and felt they were worth taking.

Because the hotel was not on the state heritage list, they were never at risk of the heftiest punishments for demolition of a protected building - a $373,104 fine and/or up to five years in jail for each guilty party.

According to Lord Mayor Robert Doyle, they could still face about $1 million in fines, for breaches not of the heritage overlay but of the Planning and Environment Act (development without a permit) and the Building Act carrying out building work without a permit and breach of a stop-work order).

It seems not unlikely such financial punishments were factored into the developers' thinking when they bought the site for $4.76 million last August.

Some back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest how this might look. Let's imagine they planned to build a high-rise apartment block with, say 100 apartments, with an average value of $600,000 each. That's $60 million - and at the typical developer margin of 20 per cent, that's $12 million in profit. They reportedly paid over the odds for the hotel, but that's only the case if the heritage overlay prevents high-rise development. Get rid of that pesky obstacle and the sky's the limit - for your building and the profits to be made from it.

These are not the first developers to chance their arm with a shortcut of this sort. A developer who demolished a 90-year-old factory in Richmond in 2011 was fined and ordered to rebuild using the original bricks.

In Britain, a developer was ordered to rebuild a pub in the London suburb of Kilburn this year after demolishing it illegally. Incidentally, it was called the Carlton Tavern.

But while there is clear precedent for councils to order the reconstruction of illegally demolished buildings, the City of Melbourne has so far taken the line that it is powerless to demand such recourse in this case.

With council elections upon us, this is a perfect moment to make it clear that's not good enough. If heritage really matters to Melburnians, now is the time to demand those who govern us prove they feel the same way.

Karl Quinn is a senior writer.

❊ What's On ❊

➼ Corkman Park

❊ Address ❊

 ⊜  160 Leicester St Carlton 3053 View Map

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❊ Web Links ❊

➼ The Corkman Irish Pub 

➼ www.thecorkman.com.au

➼ www.change.org

➼ www.broadsheet.com.au

➼ Save our pubs! Why Melbourne pubs are under threat and how to help your local

❊ Also See... ❊

➼ Corkman Park






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