План Мельбурна: Сетка Ходдла и развитие центрального делового района

Layout of the Melbourne central business district

The Hoddle Grid is the contemporary name given to the approximately grid of streets that form the Melbourne central business district, Australia. Bounded by Flinders Street, Spring Street, La Trobe Street, and Spencer Street, it lies at an angle to the rest of the Melbourne suburban grid, and so is easily recognisable. It is named after the surveyor Robert Hoddle, who marked it out in 1837 (to Lonsdale Street, extended to La Trobe Street the next year), establishing the first formal town plan. This grid of streets, laid out when there were only a few hundred settlers, became the nucleus for what is now Melbourne, a city of over five million people.

The term 'Hoddle Grid' emerged in common use only in the 21st century. While it has long been well known that Robert Hoddle laid out the central grid of streets most commonly referred to as 'the City', it was not traditionally named after him. In the 19th and early 20th Century the focus was more on Collins Street, the grandest thoroughfare, with the most expensive and exclusive buildings along its length, while the western and northern edges comprised unremarkable low rise residential and light industrial development. By the 1950s the phrase 'Golden Mile' comes into use, describing Collins Street itself. The "Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme Report", published by the Board of Works in 1954 refers to the area as 'The Central Business Area'. The phrase 'CBD' or Central Business District appears in the 1960s, probably within the publication of the 'Borrie Report' in 1964, and the subsequent Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme, enacted in 1968. CBD is still the most common phrase to refer to the central grid area of Melbourne. Official planning strategies in the 1980s and 90s did not use the phrase 'Hoddle Grid'; for instance the State Government's "Central Melbourne : Framework for the Future", published December 1984, identifies it as 'the formal city grid' (p25), while the City of Melbourne's 'Grids and Greenery', published 1987, picks out the skewed grid of streets in various graphics, but only names it as 'the city centre'. More recently the Encyclopedia of Melbourne, published in book form in 2005, and online in 2008, calls it the "City Grid', while another entry on Roads, describing the wider subdivision of Melbourne, calls the central area 'the Hoddle grid'. The phrase appeared in The Age newspaper as early as 2002.

All major streets are in width, while all blocks are exactly square. The total dimensions, including widths of streets, are thus by The grid's longest axis is oriented 70 degrees clockwise from true north, to align better with the course of the Yarra River. The majority of Melbourne is oriented at 8 degrees clockwise from true north noting that magnetic north was 8.05° E in 1900, increasing to 11.7° E in 2009.

Robert Hoddle also surveyed a separate north south grid of streets at one mile spacing around the central city grid. The origin of this grid, marked on the 1837 map, was on the crest of Batman's Hill, striking magnetic north for one mile, to an east west line (now Victoria Street/Parade) marking the northern extent of the government reserve outside the central grid. The rest of metropolitan Melbourne generally follows this grid pattern.