Coop’s Shot Tower, Melbourne Central shopping centre, Melbourne, Australia’
Apart from eating and drinking my way round Melbourne with Gabe and Dave [Eat your way round St Kilda, Eat your way round central Melbourne and Exploring Melbourne: Madame Brussels] I’d come to the city to work. This was the starting point for my lecture tour with the Australian Decorative & Fine Arts Societies [ADFAS: http://www.adfas.org.au], and as soon as I met my Melbourne host Christine Penfold I knew I was in good hands.
Christine brought to my hotel not only a fat folder of air-, train- and bus-tickets, but also a beautiful bowl of fruit to sustain me. This told me that I was being looked after, as I had been with the New Zealand Decorative & Fine Art Societies, by warm-hearted, civilised people with imagination and a flair for enjoying life.
ADFAS put me up at the Mercure, Spring Gardens [http://www.accorhotels.com/gb/hotel-2086-mercure-melbourne-treasury-gardens/index.shtml] which meant that when I wasn’t needed for their programme I could find everything I wanted on the doorstep – food and wi-fi at the Spaghetti Tree [http://www.spaghettitree.com.au] and a memorable independent bookshop: http://www.hillofcontentbookshop.com.
The one tourist site I fitted in within my work-schedule was the 165-feet-high Coops Shot Tower (1889) [http://www.walkingmelbourne.com/building543_coops-shot-tower.html] spectacularly enclosed in the dome of the Melbourne Central shopping-centre, built in 1991.
Built to manufacture lead shot by dropping molten lead through a copper sieve, it’s not even the tallest shot-tower in Melbourne: the sister Clifton Hill Shot Tower of 1885, [http://vhd.heritage.vic.gov.au/vhd/heritagevic#detail_places;295] built by the same Coops family, stands 263 feet high.
I’d never paid any attention to shot towers in the UK, though I knew there was one in Derby that was demolished in 1931-2 to make way for the bus station.
There are remaining examples in Chester (1799) [http://www.imagesofengland.org.uk/details/default.aspx?id=205292], Twickenham (late 18th-/early 19th-century) [http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-205292-shot-tower-twickenham] and Bristol (1968) [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Shot.tower.bristol.arp.jpg].
