Melbourne's central business district is built on the Hoddle Grid, a compact rectangle of streets laid out by surveyor Robert Hoddle in 1837. The grid is small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes, yet dense enough to spend days exploring. Between the main streets run laneways — narrow, often cobbled passages lined with street art, hidden bars, specialty coffee shops, and boutiques that would be invisible to anyone sticking to Swanston or Collins Street.
The eastern end of the CBD clusters around Federation Square and the Yarra River, where the cultural institutions concentrate. The western end is scruffier and more mixed, with the Queen Victoria Market just north of the grid and the legal and financial district around William and Queen Streets. Collins Street, the main east-west artery, rises gently from the waterfront to Spring Street, passing from corporate towers to a retail strip to the grand Victorian government buildings at its top end.