A City of Perth grant is helping revitalise the historic Bon Marche Arcade, injecting fresh energy into one of the city’s heritage shopping laneways as part of the council’s ongoing efforts to support small businesses and preserve the character of Perth’s older commercial precincts. The funding forms part of a broader pattern of council investment aimed at activating heritage buildings and laneways that might otherwise struggle to compete with larger, purpose-built retail centres.

Heritage arcades like Bon Marche represent a distinctive piece of Perth’s built history, offering a different retail and hospitality experience to the city’s larger shopping centres, one built around smaller, often independently owned businesses operating from character-filled, architecturally significant spaces.

Why Heritage Arcades Need Support

Older commercial arcades and laneways across Australian cities have faced sustained pressure in recent decades from the rise of large-format shopping centres, changing consumer habits, and, more recently, the growth of online retail, all factors that have made it harder for smaller, independent businesses in heritage precincts to compete without additional support. Perth’s CBD has experienced its own version of this broader challenge, with some heritage laneways struggling to maintain consistent foot traffic and tenancy occupancy compared to their historical heyday.

City grants targeted at specific heritage precincts aim to address this challenge directly, providing funding that can support everything from physical restoration and improved lighting and signage through to marketing and events designed to draw shoppers and visitors back into these historic spaces.

Part of a Broader City of Perth Strategy

The Bon Marche Arcade grant sits within the City of Perth’s wider Capital City Plan: Towards 2036 and Beyond, adopted by council in 2026, which sets out the city’s long-term strategic vision including priorities around economic vitality, heritage preservation and activating the CBD’s public and semi-public spaces. Supporting heritage arcades and laneways features as part of that broader vision, reflecting recognition that Perth’s character and appeal to residents and visitors alike depends partly on preserving these distinctive older commercial spaces alongside newer development.

What It Means for Local Businesses

For small business owners operating within Bon Marche Arcade, the grant funding offers practical support at a time when many independent retailers and hospitality operators continue navigating cost pressures from rent, wages and supply costs, alongside the broader challenge of drawing customers into the CBD as work-from-home arrangements have reduced weekday foot traffic compared to pre-pandemic levels in many Australian city centres.

Local business associations have generally welcomed targeted council support of this kind, arguing that heritage precincts require different kinds of assistance than standard retail strips, given their unique physical constraints and the specific character-preservation considerations that come with operating in a heritage-listed or heritage-significant building.

A Model for Other Heritage Precincts

If successful, the Bon Marche Arcade revitalisation could serve as a template for similar support directed toward other heritage arcades and laneways across Perth’s CBD, several of which face comparable challenges balancing heritage preservation with commercial viability in a retail environment that continues evolving rapidly.

What Comes Next

With the grant funding now flowing into the arcade, attention turns to how quickly the investment translates into visible improvements and increased foot traffic for the small businesses operating within the historic space. For a city continuing to navigate the post-pandemic shift in CBD foot traffic patterns, targeted investment in distinctive heritage precincts like Bon Marche Arcade offers one practical way of giving shoppers and visitors a genuine reason to rediscover parts of the city centre they might otherwise overlook.

A Piece of Perth’s Retail History

Arcades like Bon Marche have played a distinctive role in Perth’s retail history since the early twentieth century, when covered shopping laneways offered shoppers protection from the elements while housing a mix of specialty traders that larger department stores of the era did not typically carry. Many Australian capital cities retain at least one or two heritage arcades of this kind, often surviving multiple waves of redevelopment pressure precisely because of the heritage protections and community attachment that eventually formed around them.

Local historians and heritage advocates have periodically highlighted the cultural and architectural value of spaces like Bon Marche Arcade, arguing that losing these distinctive commercial spaces to demolition or radical redevelopment would strip away a layer of the city’s character that cannot be easily recreated once gone.

Tenants within the arcade have welcomed the additional support, noting that even relatively modest funding can make a meaningful difference for small, independently run businesses operating on tight margins, particularly when directed toward improvements that genuinely draw more foot traffic into the space rather than purely cosmetic changes.

The council has indicated it will monitor foot traffic and tenancy outcomes in the arcade following the grant’s rollout, using the results to help inform whether similar targeted support should be extended to other heritage precincts facing comparable challenges across the CBD.