Melbourne’s inner north—from Fitzroy to Collingwood, Carlton to Brunswick—is full of facades that hold onto memory. Some walls carry the faded lettering of ghost signs, while others are covered with murals, graffiti, or the patina of everyday life. Together, they form a layered archive of the city, one that shifts and fades but never stops speaking.
In Carlton, ghost signs peek through weathered brickwork, their words half-lost to time. Once bold hand-painted advertisements, they now dissolve into abstraction—an accidental kind of art shaped by sunlight, rain, and decades of change.
In Collingwood laneways, the walls themselves become living canvases. Murals and tags overlap with crumbling surfaces, constantly renewed and rewritten. This is the side of Melbourne that feels most alive—where art is temporary and the street becomes the gallery.
Some images are unmistakably historic. The Bushells tea ghost sign, still clinging to a brick wall, has outlasted the shopfronts it once promoted. Once functional, it now stands as a piece of design history—its lettering celebrated for its imperfection, a reminder of how advertising becomes artefact.
Hidden North is about preserving these traces before they disappear. Every photograph—whether of a ghost sign in Fitzroy, a Collingwood laneway mural, or a Carlton facade—is both art and archive. Together, they capture Melbourne’s evolving story, hidden in plain sight.
