The corner of Rokeby Road and Roberts Road began as an entirely ordinary commercial site, occupied by mid-20th-century retail, including a drapery store selling fabrics, household textiles and clothing essentials. Drapers were once a backbone of suburban shopping strips but they rarely survive in historical records because they changed hands frequently, rebranded often and were seldom considered important enough to document.

 

Over time, as shopping habits changed and retail outlets consolidated, the site transitioned into furniture and carpet emporium. Many locals remember it as being associated with Kevin Parry, a prominent Perth businessman, whose wealth was built through furniture ventures. While the precise name of the shop, trading dates and ownership details remain difficult to confirm, it was something commonly seen in suburban shopping strips: practical, high-visibility retail uses occupying prominent corners before redevelopment later took over.

 

When the Subiaco Pavilion Markets opened on 11 November 1982, they changed how Subiaco functioned, particularly due to its location. Sitting directly on Rokeby Road, the suburb’s main pedestrian street, the markets were impossible to avoid. People didn’t have to plan a visit when they were just passing through. Coffee turned into browsing, browsing into lunch, lunch into shopping. The markets stitched together the entire precinct, quietly feeding foot traffic to surrounding shops, cafes and pubs, with its mix of fresh food, takeaway stalls, odd little retailers, services and people who didn’t fit neatly anywhere else. Most importantly, they helped people create a habit. You went because it was Saturday, not because something special was happening. That repetition mattered more than anything else. It made Subiaco feel alive, even on ordinary weekends, rather than just on event days.

 

Subiaco also had the Station Street Markets and they’re often spoken about with the same nostalgia. They were genuinely loved but they worked very differently. Located north of the railway line in what was once a light-industrial area, they functioned as a destination rather than a thoroughfare. The railway line acted as both a physical and psychological barrier, meaning people went there deliberately and then left again. They never sat within Subiaco’s main pedestrian flow and never generated incidental foot traffic along Rokeby Road. As a result, they didn’t shape the suburb’s retail life in the same way.

 

When the Pavilion Markets closed in the mid-2000s, the site remained boarded up and vacant for almost a decade. Highly visible and increasingly derelict, right in the heart of Subiaco. It became a daily reminder of the past. As other pressures mounted, like a change in shopping habits, increasing rent and the end of Subiaco Oval, the empty markets site came to symbolise everything that felt wrong. Public sentiment changed. The conversation moved away from preserving what had been lost and toward frustration that nothing was happening at all. The longer the site sat empty, the more people felt that doing nothing was worse than almost any redevelopment.

 

Subiaco’s planning scheme had always limited buildings to around eight storeys, reflecting a desire to preserve a low-rise suburb. This meant that nothing taller should have ever been possible for the markets site. As the proposed development was being discussed, decisions increasingly shifted away from the City of Subiaco and into state-level development assessment panels, where broader economic and strategic considerations could override local controls.

 

The former market site was treated as exceptional. It had been vacant for way too long, sat near important rail infrastructure, was framed as a gateway location and it had become politically embarrassing to do nothing at all. Earlier approvals had already weakened the original height limit on the land, making further increases easier to justify. By the time the final proposal was considered, the debate was no longer about whether the building was too tall but whether Subiaco could afford a further delay.

 

That is how the 24-storey tower at One Subiaco came to be approved. Not because the rules disappeared but because they were deliberately overridden. The site was framed as a one-off solution to a long-standing problem, even though it shifted expectations about what was possible elsewhere.

 

Despite the strong nostalgia, a traditional Pavilion-style market was never realistically going to return on the ground floor of the tower. Stall-based markets generate lower and less predictable income, require constant hands-on management, create noise, waste and delivery conflicts and are difficult to finance under high-end apartments. Instead, the redevelopment delivered a curated ground-level mix of hospitality, retail, laneways and programmed events in an attempt to capture the feeling of a market without recreating its structure.

 

In more recent years, Subiaco has hosted night markets and similar events, as part of what planners now call “activation”. The word has become a popular buzzword because councils can’t enforce affordable rents, prevent land banking or recreate lost habits. What they can do is program events, book performers and temporarily make places look busy. Activation creates moments. The Pavilion Markets created routine.

 

Subiaco can feel lively again but it won’t feel the same unless everyday life is allowed to return. What made the markets powerful was not nostalgia but a permanent presence, accessibility and repetition. Reviving that kind of vibrancy depends less on towers and events and more on affordable small tenancies, walkable streets and ordinary reasons to hang around without needing a special event.