East Perth is an inner suburb of

Perth Perth is the list of Australian capital cities, capital and largest city of the Australian states and territories of Australia, state of Western Australia. It is the list of cities in Australia by population, fourth most populous city in Aust ...

, Western Australia, located next to the Perth central business district. Claise Brook and Claisebrook Cove are within the suburb. Formerly characterised by industrial land uses and urban blight, the redevelopment of East Perth was, and remains, the largest inner-city urban renewal project in the state. The design of the new residential neighbourhoods was strongly influenced by the

new urbanism New Urbanism is an urban design movement which promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually in ...

movement.

Land use

Primarily an industrial area in the early twentieth century, it was the location of the East Perth Gas Works,

East Perth Power Station The East Perth Power Station is a disused power station in East Perth, Western Australia. For most of its life it was coal-fired, but ran on oil for six years. The site consists of a complex of industrial buildings occupying more than , bo ...

(which was decommissioned and the building is being renovated for other purposes), the East Perth railway yard, and

engine sheds An engine or motor is a machine designed to convert one or more forms of energy into mechanical energy. Available energy sources include potential energy (e.g. energy of the Earth's gravitational field as exploited in hydroelectric power ...

. From the early 1980s, virtually all of the residential real estate on the western side of Lord Street became home to commercial enterprises; the buildings remain, either single or duplex dwellings previously inhabited mostly by migrant families.

Population

In the 2016

Census A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring, recording and calculating information about the members of a given population. This term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common censuses in ...

, there were 10,596 people in East Perth. 30.3% of people were born in Australia. The most common countries of birth were England 6.7%, China 4.0%, India 3.7%, Malaysia 3.4% and South Korea 2.9%. 47.6% of people only spoke English at home. Other languages spoken at home included Mandarin 6.6%, Korean 2.7%, Cantonese 2.6%, Portuguese 2.0% and Spanish 1.9%. The most common responses for religion were No Religion 33.3% and Catholic 18.4%.

Cemetery

East Perth is the location of Perth's significant early colonial era cemetery, which contains graves of many early colonial families. Its condition is marginal due to the loss of many headstones and lack of adequate record of graves, only 800 of the estimated 10,000 grave sites have been identified.

Railway

The former East Perth railway yard and engine sheds were removed in the 1960s and have been redeveloped into the Railway headquarters - consolidating a very scattered system of offices and sections for the railways. East Perth serves as the main hub for country and interstate rail services and Road Coach services. Departing from the station are services such as the '' Prospector'', '' AvonLink'', tourist trains, and the ''

Indian Pacific The ''Indian Pacific'' is a weekly experiential tourism passenger train service that runs in Australia's east–west rail corridor between Sydney, on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and Perth, on the shore of the Indian Ocean – thus, li ...

''. The original East Perth railway station is now called Claisebrook, and while it has the same number of platforms that it did in the 1960s, the original buildings have given way to modern shelters. It is also the location of the

Goongoongup Bridge Goongoongup Bridge is a railway bridge in East Perth, Western Australia which crosses the Swan River and forms part of the Armadale line. It opened on 24 July 1995 as part of the electrification of Perth's suburban railway network."New Perth ...

on the railway to Bunbury for the South Western Railway.

Redevelopment Authority

East Perth Redevelopment Authority (EPRA) was established in 1991 to manage the redevelopment and urbanisation of the suburb. In 2012 EPRA merged with other redevelopment authorities to become the

Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority The Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority (MRA) was a statutory authority of the Government of Western Australia. It was established on 1 January 2012 pursuant to the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority Act 2011 and reported to the Minister f ...

(MRA). In 2019, the MRA became part of

DevelopmentWA DevelopmentWA is a land development agency of the Western Australian government. It was formed in September 2019 as a merger of the Metropolitan Redevelopment Authority and the Western Australian Land Authority, then known as Landcorp. Developme ...

. Many parts of East Perth that have been fully developed have been “normalised”—meaning returned to the City of Perth for administration.

Sports

Sporting attractions include the WACA Ground and Gloucester Park trotting ground.

Education

Educational facilities include Trinity College, a day school for boys, years 4–12.

Notes

References

* Bodycoat, Ronald. (1993) ''East Perth heritage study : prepared for the East Perth Development Authority'' East Perth, W.A. The Authority. 2 volumes (Volume 1 only held in Battye Library). {{Authority control Suburbs of Perth, Western Australia * Suburbs in the City of Vincent New Urbanism communities