Brighton Beach on the eastern side of Port Phillip Bay, just 11km south of Melbourne, has been part of the city’s life for more than 150 years, its long sweep of sand framed by bathing boxes that have become as much a symbol of the city as Flinders Street Station. The Bunurong/Boon Wurrung people fished and gathered shellfish here for millennia, leaving behind middens along the bluffs. European settlement brought roads, the opening of Brighton Beach station in 1861, and an easy escape from the city once the line pushed through to Sandringham in 1887.
The first sea baths were built at Middle Brighton in the 1880s, grand timber structures enclosing a stretch of bay to allow men and women to bathe separately. After storms repeatedly wrecked them, a concrete-walled open-sea pool was built in 1936, still used daily by cold-water swimmers. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club had been formed earlier, in 1875, and grew with the marina into one of Victoria’s leading yachting centres. Just north, the bathing boxes began appearing in the 1860s, multiplying after the First World War and shifting higher up the sand in the 1930s as seawalls and promenades altered the foreshore.
By the mid-20th century the beach was already a magnet for popular culture. In 1959 Marilyn Monroe is said to have posed on the sand during her Australian visit (with husband Arthur Miller), the bathing boxes forming the backdrop to photographs (though I’ve not been able to find a source to confirm this). In recent times, there have been recurring seaweed invasions, with piles of rotting kelp and seagrass creating a stench along the foreshore, sometimes requiring heavy machinery to clear. Other summers have brought swarms of lion’s mane jellyfish, their metre-long tentacles driving swimmers from the water. Local councils experimented with booms and regular sand clearance, while health officers reassured residents the jellyfish were a nuisance more than a danger.
In 1930 Brighton Beach was the scene of one of the bay’s few fatal shark attacks, when 16-year-old Norman William Clark was seized near the Middle Brighton pier before horrified onlookers. Decades later a basking seal asleep on the sand led police to cordon off the beach until it swam away. Over the years, there have been fiercely contested council debates over whether the bathing boxes should remain. Public sentiment, though, and their growing heritage status have prevailed so they are now tightly controlled, passing between generations or fetching extraordinary prices on the private market. Reports in September 2025 of sales approaching one million dollars again underlined their status as coveted assets despite having no plumbing or power.
Today Brighton Beach remains a blend of heritage and utility. The Dendy Street Beach pavilion, completed in 2025, houses the Brighton Life Saving Club along with a café, toilets and showers. The Middle Brighton Baths continue to offer enclosed swimming with boardwalks and changing areas. The Royal Brighton Yacht Club operates a busy marina and social rooms. The Bay Trail runs the length of the foreshore, with car parks, ramps and stair access from the Esplanade. Seasonal dog rules, CCTV proposals to combat break-ins at the boxes, and ongoing sand renourishment programmes show how the beach remains actively managed. (The images above have been taken from Wikipedia and Googlemaps.)
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