Adelaide Arcade, South Australia

Adelaide Arcade must be the envy of many arcades round the world: it has achieved high occupancy rate, high footfall and a fantastic awareness of its own history, with a museum upstairs in the arcade where there are highlights of the arcade’s past and even a recording of the original polka tune composed for the arcade opening in 1885.

The delights of this arcade in Adelaide begin with the entrances: in the main shopping street Rundle Mall, up at the top is a domed roof where once upon a time retailers would sometimes take out the space for advertising. Above the entrance itself is the emu and kangaroo emblem of the arcade, which pre-dates Australia’s emblem by a few years, the owners of the arcade having guessed that their design might one day become the national emblem, only for the final Australian design to swap the positioning of the emu and kangaroo…

Inside, the arcade has two levels, three if you include the old stairs down to the original tea rooms in the basement (though this is no longer accessible, at least they took away the covering that once blocked the view down to the tea rooms’ entrance). The floor tiling has a vintage look, though it is the result of a 1970s refurb, where tiles were used as close to the original as was feasible at the time.

At the far end, above the entrance there is a still a space today, where an orchestra used to play music for promenaders, and behind this space a beautiful window looking out over Grenfell Street. Back at the Rundle Mall end, the matching space was once taken up by a large billiard hall, more recently a soda bar, but this too was closed the day of our visit.

The only café open in the arcade for our visit was full to capacity; the arcade was full too, with some posing for pictures, many browsing the shops, and some probably just passing through. But this is what arcades were built for, and there is much to tempt the passer-by today: quirky shops like Bonnie Wigs (since 1968), the button bar, the Adelaide hatters; more creative stores like the independent artists shop and the vintage clothes shop; and then a whole series of independent shops running the range of retail outlets from books, shoes, jewellery, gifts along with beauty, stationery, and the Cielo Tea Room, which is run by a Chilean lady who wants to preserve the arcade’s tea room traditions.

My favourite shop today

My favourite shops have to be the quirky ones: Bonnie’s Wigs for ladies and gentlemen! The Button Bar. And the Adelaide Hatters. I would also have gone to Cielo Tea Rooms, but she was closed over the Easter weekend we were there.

My pick of the arcade’s past

Disaster struck the arcade one evening in 1887 when the Arcade Beadle, Francis Cluney, a Crimean war veteran who would proudly wear his medals while patrolling the arcade got himself tangled up in the machinery controlling the lighting in the arcade. He had just told a passer-by that he intended to switch off the lights to try to deter the mischievous larrikins at play that evening, but he must have slipped and fallen into the machinery, his body being terribly mangled in the process. Some say his ghost still roams the arcade in quiet moments…

Adelaide Arcade played host to several factories in its early days. The Inspector of Factories’ report in 1896 spoke of ‘large numbers of women and young girls employed’ in these factories with ‘absent or totally insufficient sanitary conveniences’, with water pressure so low in the hotter months that buckets of water had to be carried up the stairs to flush the toilets. Improvements were made but better water supply had to wait for a new reservoir to be completed outside Adelaide.

One story from the waxworks, which was once in the arcade drew headlines during the Second World War. Some uniformed soldiers had paid a visit, and the manager of the museum left them alone for a few minutes. When he returned he saw that the wax model of Adolf Hitler had disappeared. The press led with stories of police searching for Hitler in Adelaide, and one article concluded that if he was found, he would probably not be “in the immaculate condition in which he disappeared.”

This arcade in films or books

A 2008 Indian science-fiction romance was filmed in Adelaide Arcade – name was Love Story 2050, but it was not a big hit, earning about half from box office sales of what it cost to make.