Victoria Street in Richmond is one of Melbourne's best-known eating and shopping strips. Early on Monday 6 July, a stretch of it was closed to cars and trams while more than 80 firefighters fought a fire that began with a car driven into a shopfront.
What was reported
According to the ABC, at about 4.15am a white car was driven into a tobacco store on Victoria Street and set alight, and the offenders fled. Nobody was inside the store.
- Fire Rescue Victoria said about ten businesses in the building were affected. Commander Sarah Lostia said it took about an hour and a half to bring the fire under control, and that smoke spread about a kilometre.
- Almost 30 fire trucks attended. Power was isolated to nearby homes.
- Victoria Street was closed between Church and Hoddle streets, and three tram routes were halted for the morning.
- Police said the shopfronts either side of the tobacco store were affected. The ABC reported damage to neighbouring shops including an optometrist.
- Days earlier, a note had allegedly been left on the tobacco store's front telling the owners to contact "The Commission", a suspected organised crime group that police say targets businesses for extortion.
Local councillor Stephen Jolly said it was the fourth fire targeting a Richmond business in just over a month, and the worst by a long way. AAP reported that police linked the attack to syndicates fighting over the illicit tobacco market, and that it followed more than 150 tobacco store fires in Victoria since March 2023.
The cost lands next door
There's a lot of coverage of why tobacco stores are being attacked. Less attention goes to the businesses around them.
A strip like Victoria Street is mostly older buildings divided into small tenancies. They share walls, roof spaces and services. A fire started in one shop at 4am doesn't stay in that shop. By the time crews arrive it may already be in the ceiling, and smoke and water damage spread further than the flames.
For the businesses next door, the consequences go well beyond repairs. There's the days or weeks of closure, stock lost to smoke and water, a frontage boarded up during trading, and a street closed to the passing trade they depend on.
Insurance questions worth asking now
We're not insurance advisers, and every policy is different. But a fire like this raises questions every strip trader and landlord should be able to answer before it happens, not after:
- Business interruption. Does your policy cover lost income if you can't trade because of damage that started in someone else's premises? For how long?
- Access. Some policies treat closure because the street is shut or the building is unsafe differently from closure because your own shop is damaged.
- Glass and frontage. Is shopfront glass covered, and with what excess?
- Disclosure. If a neighbouring business is a known target, would your insurer expect to be told? Would it affect cover or premiums?
An insurance broker is the right person to answer these for your specific policy.
Where a barrier fits
We haven't seen this building and aren't suggesting what would have happened with a barrier in place. What's clear from the reporting is the order of events: the car went in first, and the fire followed.
That's the step physical barriers address. Steel bollards set in front of a shopfront, anchored deep and spaced so a car can't pass between them, stop a vehicle reaching the glass or roller door. Without the vehicle, an attacker has to break in on foot, which takes longer, makes more noise and exposes them to cameras for longer.
It's just as important to say what bollards don't do. They don't stop someone breaking a window by hand and throwing an incendiary through it. They don't address extortion, and they don't fix the illicit tobacco trade. That's police work, and the work of the governments involved.
A strip-wide conversation
Because the risk is shared, the response often works best when it's shared too:
- Landlords own the building, and usually the setback or forecourt if there is one. A row of bollards protects every tenant's frontage, not just one.
- Neighbouring tenants carry much of the cost when one shop is targeted, and have a direct interest in the frontage next door.
- Councils own most strip footpaths. Bollards on public land need their approval, and traders asking together carry more weight than one asking alone.
The lesson from Victoria Street for every strip in Melbourne is that when one shopfront can be rammed, the shops either side have a stake in what's out the front.