Kingston City

Kingston is a city council formed on 15 December 1994, by the amalgamation of all of Chelsea, most of Mordialloc and parts of Moorabbin, Oakleigh and Springvale cities. The council’s headquarters are at Cheltenham, 19 km south-east of central Melbourne. It revived the name of a locality dating from the nineteenth century.

The name originated as Kingstown, from the urging of the brothers Richard and John King, owners of a grazing property in the Moorabbin area. They acquired the property in 1846 from John O'Shanassy, who later rose to become a Premier of Victoria. The King brothers favoured the name Kingslands, but Kingstown was adopted and modified to become Kingston. A primary school which opened in 1870 had the name, but it was replaced by Heatherton in 1880. The name was preserved in 1925 when the Elsternwick Golf Club moved to the area and named itself Kingston Heath. It adjoins a large geriatric centre, formerly the Melbourne Home and Hospital for Men, and later called the Kingston Centre.

The Kingston municipality contains much of Melbourne's ‘sand belt’ area, extending southwards from Clayton to the former Carrum Swamp, and the coastal beaches from Mentone to Patterson Lakes. Its area is 90.8 sq km. There are district offices are at Chelsea and Mentone. Kingston city’s main shopping areas are Southland on the Nepean Highway near Cheltenham railway station, Mordialloc and Chelsea. There are free-standing drive-in outlets on Warrigal Road and on Centre Dandenong Road near the Moorabbin airport.

Kingston city’s census populations have been:

Kingston’s proximity to Port Phillip Bay’s beaches has been an incentive for free-standing houses to be replaced by higher-density living as measured at the 2001 and 2011 census: