Building design & drafting in Preston.

What's built here

The railway arrived in 1904 and was electrified in 1926, which drove interwar subdivision of the farmland. By 1930 the High Street and Plenty Road shopping strips had formed. Then the postwar wave: the municipality grew 37% between 1947 and 1954, and the Housing Commission built around 2,600 dwellings across east Preston and Reservoir between 1947 and 1966. The result is a genuinely mixed stock — Federation and interwar villas in the older western parts, 1940s clinker-brick duplexes, Housing Commission stock in pockets, and extensive later infill.

The planning context

Preston is carrying two distinct state-sanctioned redevelopment processes at the same time, and they are not the same thing. The Preston Market Precinct came through Amendment C182dare, gazetted in August 2023, applying Activity Centre Zone Schedule 1 — it requires substantial retention of the existing market in situ, a new 12,700m² market east of the current site, around 1,200 new dwellings, heights from 3 to 14 storeys, and 3,800m² of public open space. Separately, the Preston High Street Activity Centre is a state pilot under the Activity Centre Program (GC252), targeting roughly 10,200 new homes, with core areas at 4 to 10 storeys and most of the broader catchment at 3. Adjacent, distinct, different height regimes. Conflating them is an expensive mistake.

Controls that actually apply in Preston

• Heritage Overlay HO95 — Newlands Estate — The Housing Commission postwar estate, generally bounded by Elizabeth Street, Murray Road, George Street and Murphy Street.
• Heritage Overlay HO168 — Preston Tramway Area — Interwar housing bounded by Oakover Road, Gillingham Street, Davies Street and Devon Street.
• Heritage Overlay HO169 — Preston State School precinct — Interwar detached houses around Orient Grove, Oakover Road, Etnam Street and Scotia Street. No permit exemptions apply here — unlike HO103 and HO104.
• Heritage Overlay HO103 — Kelley Grove — A small precinct of 1940s clinker-brick duplexes at 1–10 Kelley Grove.
• Heritage Overlay HO104 — Collins Street — Substantial early twentieth century Federation and interwar villas at 1–35 and 2A–36 Collins Street.
• Character precincts — Darebin's 2007 Neighbourhood Character Study established eight preferred character precincts across the municipality, each with its own statement and guidelines.

Check what sits over your own title in two minutes, free: search your address on the Victorian Government's planning property report. Send it to us and we can usually tell you whether a permit is likely from one conversation.

What we typically do in Preston

Heritage permit work inside the named precincts, especially the Federation and Edwardian villas of HO104; medium-density townhouses and apartments within the Market and High Street catchments; navigating sites that straddle an ACZ or GRZ boundary.

Whatever the type, the documentation is the same discipline: architectural drafting drawn to be built, town planning drawings council can assess first time, and working drawings a builder can price without padding.

Planning controls change — amendments are gazetted regularly. Everything above was accurate at the time of writing, but confirm current controls for your specific address before relying on them.

Talk to us about your Preston project

Send us the address and the planning property report and we will tell you what applies — before you commit to anything. Get in touch, or see everywhere else we work.