The Corkman Irish pub and the University of Melbourne Law School were a perfect pair.
On opposite corners of a bustling street in Carlton, they sat staring at one another: one of the cities oldest pubs and the country’s oldest law school.
The relationship was not just about rowdy nights across the road. Those students kept a watchful eye over their local and rioted when it was destroyed.
In a blog post published a decade ago by the National Trust of Australia, the author wrote: “If you want to get away with murder, it’s probably unwise to attempt it in the shadow of a law faculty.”
It is the perfect way to summarise the events that unfolded on the corner of Leicester and Pelham streets in 2016 when a pair of rogue developers did the unthinkable and demolished the 1857 pub without a planning permit, a demolition permit or a building permit and despite a heritage overlay.
Shock, outrage and indignation followed the bulldozing of the heritage building after developers Raman Shiqiri and Stefce Kutlesovski tore it down. Leading the charge were law students who mounted a campaign to resurrect the Corkman, but all of Melbourne was mortified.
A part of the city’s fabric, one that stood for 159 years, had been so senselessly destroyed.
What followed was a drawn out legal saga that to briefly summarise involved month-long jail sentences for contempt of court for both Shiqiri and Kutlesovski, a $1.1 million fine and orders to rebuild the original pub facade.
Ten years on, the job is finally finished. Well, sort of.
The exterior of the former Corkman Irish pub — also for a time known as the Carlton Inn — has been painstakingly restored with the guidance of a heritage architect.
But inside it is an empty shell. The rebuild did not stipulate that the interior was part of the deal and no tenant has been found to put money into what could again become a gathering space.
Critics, including University of Melbourne law students Tim Staindl and Duncan Wallace — who lodged VCAT objections and labelled the project the ‘Temu Corkman’ — this week stood by their criticisms.
“It’s a disgrace that it has taken almost a decade to get to this point,” Mr Staindl told The Age.
“The job’s not done yet.”
Mr Shiqiri this week told media he made the wrong decision and 10 years on that is clear.
“I still regret it now,” he said.
“I have learned a lot about the heritage.”
Court documents from 2019, seen by news.com.au, show how the saga unfolded. It started with a fire, deliberately lit, on October 8, 2016 “in several areas of the ground floor of the hotel”.
“At 5:54am the Metropolitan Fire Brigade responded to a report of smoke coming from the Hotel and managed to bring the fire under control at 6.31am, shortly after the fire had commenced,” the documents read.
A senior building inspector from Melbourne City Council, Frank Magaldi, inspected the site two days later and reached out to Mr Shiqiri, who had purchased the property in 2014 for $4.8m with a view to build luxury apartments.
Mr Magaldi organised a meeting with Mr Shiqiri for October 14 to “check if there are any structural issues in relation to the recent fire”.
That meeting was postponed by the developers to October 17 but “without any further communication between Mr Shaqiri or Mr Kutlesovski, at about 7.15am or 7.30am on 15 October 2016, the demolition of the Hotel commenced”, court documents say.
About 80 per cent of the pub had been demolished when council staff arrived.
Mr Magaldi told Mr Kutlesovski that a Stop Work Order was going to be issued, to which Mr Kutlesovski replied: “It’s my site I can do whatever I want.”
Ten days later, Mr Shaqiri and Mr Kutlesovski sent a hand-signed letter on their company 160 Leicester Pty Ltd’s letterhead to the Minister for Planning.
The letter read:
“We apologise for having undertaken this demolition without the appropriate permits in place”.
They said the decision to demolish the building was “regrettable”, “erroneous” and “the wrong course of action”.
The pair were forced to rebuild. But critics say the use of prefabricated concrete slabs instead of brick is just one of the problems with the new building.
Inside, it is a shell.
In a petition from those law students across the street, started in the weeks after the pub was knocked down, a student wrote the following:
“The reason we all went there was because it was ludicrously close to the building in which we spent all of our other waking hours.
“But that closeness meant that everybody went there. And that everybody went there meant that a community existed. We all made great friendships while getting sloshed in the afternoon in that courtyard.”
There are no plans for pints to be poured there in the near future.
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