Feet in the clouds

Three people had told me to go to the Fitzroy area for three different reasons - markets, food and street art - so I went. I found a fourth: the architecture. Lots of the houses use wrought iron to support a house-width balcony over a ground floor veranda and it's stunning in the sun.

Fitzroy is wincingly trendy - part photogenic dilapidated and part gentrified (for Londoners: a sort of cross between Stoke Newington and Notting Hill). Immaculately restored houses have clipped trees by the front door; the streets are full of independent coffee shops, craft shops, delis, makers (well, one) of unusual mannequins for upmarket retailers, organic greengrocers, design studios, restaurants with blackboards and menus involving rocket, shops selling vintage clothes alongside the shopkeeper's own designs, even a Biba hairdressers (founded 1975) with the same logo as the Carnaby Street Biba (went out of business 1975 - hmm). I watched a sales assistant stencilling graffiti outside the Vans shop and, yes, there is street art in all the back alleys and a profoundly grungy pub as well as anti-capitalist notices and outraged posters pinned to trees for forthcoming demos. It was a hairsbreadth too real to be a parody but it was so close I expected to see the TV cameras at any moment.

Tram 96 took me all the way from there to bright St Kilda with its beach, fish and chip shops, ice cream parlours and a white-painted-wood roller-coaster in Luna Park. I arrived shortly before sunset and headed to the rocks at the end of the pier where I joined about 100 others on a boardwalk just above the beach and the lower rocks waiting for little penguins (eudyptula minor) to come in from their day's fish-catching. The colony has been growing since the 1970s and there are now about 1,100 but this time of year is not the best to see them because some spend their days hiding in the rocks and don't go out at all while others go out for two or three days. Although I saw a few in the rocks we saw only one swimming in. It chose to land on the spot of beach immediately in front of me, picked itself up and waddled very quickly under the boardwalk into the rocks. Definitely worth the 90-minute wait.