Pipemakers Park, Heritage park in Maribyrnong, Victoria.
Pipemakers Park is an 8-hectare park on the western bank of the Maribyrnong River in Maribyrnong, Melbourne. It contains three historic bluestone buildings from the former pipe works and meat preserving company, now adapted as the Living Museum of the West, plus interpreted industrial ruins. The park sits on the river floodplain below a steep escarpment of the Western Basalt Plains.
Joseph Raleigh set up a boiling-down works on the riverbank in the 1840s. The buildings were adapted for the Melbourne Meat Preserving Company in 1868, then taken over around 1911 by Hume Pipes, which made concrete pipes there until closing the factory in 1978. The Melbourne & Metropolitan Board of Works bought the site, cleaned it up and opened it as parkland in 1987.
Industrial artifacts and information displays throughout the grounds show how manufacturing worked and connect visitors to the people who labored here. The preserved structures tell a story about working life and production methods in this region.
The park lies on the western bank of the Maribyrnong River beside Highpoint Shopping Centre, with the adjacent Burton Crescent Reserve to the north and Frogs Hollow Wetlands to the south. The History of the Land Discovery Trail, converted from a factory in 1995, passes tramways, concrete chutes and repurposed pipes. The ground sits on the river floodplain below a steep escarpment, so paths can be wet after rain.
The 8-metre-high, 12-metre-wide stainless steel sculpture Pipedreams, by Matthew Harding, stands in the park; it was fabricated from marine-grade stainless steel. Nearby, the History of the Land Discovery Trail, created in 1995 in one of the factories, keeps tramways, concrete chutes, repurposed pipes and part of the original concrete slab.
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