Crown Metropol or Melbourne city centre: where to stay
Choose Crown Metropol hotel in Southbank if Crown is the main event on your Melbourne trip. If you’re coming for a broader mix of coffee, street art and unplanned exploring, favour a city-centre hotel and make Crown one outing.
Melbourne’s centre rewards that kind of wandering: coffee shops sit among colonial-era and modern buildings, with painted laneways tucked between the main streets. Southbank, the district associated with the Crown casino complex, puts more emphasis on Crown’s bars and restaurants. Think coffee and an art-filled detour versus an evening built around Crown dining.
| Base | Best fit | Neighbourhood emphasis |
|---|---|---|
| Crown Metropol, Southbank | Crown is the reason for the trip | Crown’s casino, bars and restaurants shape the district |
| City centre | Crown is one of several things you want to do | Coffee shops, street-art lanes and a mix of old and modern buildings |
Explore the centre’s street art
Hosier Lane, a narrow lane off Flinders Street, makes the street-art appeal concrete: murals and graffiti cover its surfaces, and the paintings keep changing. Go to see what’s there rather than to find a particular mural. Rutledge Lane branches from it, extending the colourful detour.
Add some time by the river
From either base, make room for the Birrarung, also known as the Yarra River. Riverside Aboriginal artworks tell stories of the area’s history and the Aboriginal Peoples of the Kulin Nation, adding another dimension to exploring central Melbourne.
Narrm is the traditional name of central Melbourne, whose Indigenous people are the Wurundjeri people. Greater Melbourne extends across the traditional lands of the Kulin Nation. The riverside art offers a way to engage with that cultural context alongside the city’s better-known laneway art.