Cook's Cottage

Captain Cook's Yorkshire home, reassembled in Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens

Cook's Cottage occupies a quiet corner of the Fitzroy Gardens, one of the formal Victorian parks running east of the CBD. Built in the 1750s in Great Ayton, Yorkshire, this two-storey stone cottage is the childhood home of Captain James Cook and, following its transport from England in 1934, the oldest building in Australia. The cottage was dismantled brick by numbered brick, shipped across the world, and reassembled on its current site for Melbourne's centenary celebrations.

The interior has been fitted out as an eighteenth-century cottage interior, with period furniture and displays about Cook's life and voyages. Outside, the surrounding Fitzroy Gardens are genuinely beautiful — formal Victorian plantings of elms and chestnuts, a fairy-tale treehouse, a model Tudor village, and conservatory. The gardens connect easily to the edge of the CBD and make for a pleasant half-hour detour from Swanston Street.

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A story
The cottage was not actually built by Captain Cook — it was constructed by his parents, Graces and James Cook senior, around 1755 in the village of Great Ayton in Yorkshire. James Cook probably visited between voyages but spent most of his adult life at sea. When the cottage came up for sale in 1933, a Melbourne philanthropist named Russell Grimwade paid £800 for it, had each of the 253 numbered casks of bricks shipped to Australia, and donated it to the city of Melbourne for the 1934 centenary celebrations.

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