As a live music venue, Adelaide’s Crown and Anchor hotel – fondly known as the Cranker – typically pulls its biggest crowds on a Friday or Saturday night. But on Sunday morning thousands of music fans turned out before the doors had even opened, before marching to Parliament House led by a live band on a flatbed truck, Acca Dacca-style.
For Evan Morony, a 44-year-old disability support worker who helped organise the rally, the turnout demonstrated a deep sense of community beneath the pub’s rock’n’roll image.
“You know, people can rock up after work in a suit and tie and they’re going to be treated the same way as someone with a mohawk and safety pins through their ears,” he says. “They’re treated with dignity and respect – that’s how society should be.”
A fortnight earlier, a laminated A4 notice was dropped off at the hotel’s front bar. The full proposal, later posted online, showed a plan by a Singapore-based developer, Wee Hur Holdings, to gut the heritage-listed hotel and build 19 storeys of student accommodation.
Like Morony, the Crown and Anchor’s publican, Tom Skipper, started going to the bar in the 1990s to see his friends’ bands play.
“The pub’s always had its finger in that alternative space,” Skipper says. “When I took it over, we decided to double down on the amount of bookings we were doing.”
Before taking on the pub in 2016, Skipper spent years running a series of pop-up venues in an adjacent building that was always earmarked for demolition. But this latest proposal – which would see his longtime landlord, the local property developer Karidis Corporation, sell the entire block to Wee Hur in a multimillion-dollar deal – came “out of the blue”, he says.
“The pub is trading exceptionally well, it’s probably the busiest it’s been in the seven years I’ve owned it,” he adds. “And certainly, since its glory days in the early 90s, it’s probably the busiest.”
In those glory days, Adelaide’s east end was home to a thriving live music scene. But many venues have been shuttered, demolished or silenced by noise-averse neighbours, even as Adelaide was recognised as a Unesco City of Music in 2015.
Just around the corner from the Crown and Anchor, the original Rhino Room hosted early performances by the Hilltop Hoods and countless comedians – until it was flattened to make way for a hotel in 2017. One street over, the Tivoli was home to a thriving live music scene – a photo from the 1980s shows bill posters for the Go-Betweens, Paul Kelly and Died Pretty – before it was incorporated into an apartment block.
“We’re the last surviving large band room that’s dedicated purely to music,” Skipper says.
Under the plans lodged by Wee Hur, the band room will become a bin room for the apartments above. The application also argues that a planned cafe “will provide a similar contribution to the public realm”.
But the 21,000 signatories to a “Save the Cranker” petition aren’t convinced.
When Morony heard news of the redevelopment in March, he started a “Save the Cranka” Facebook group. It quickly gained more than 7,000 members, from pub regulars and music fans to planning and architecture experts. After initial disagreements about how to spell the pub’s long-running nickname – Cranka or Cranker? – the group became the nerve centre for a community-led campaign.
“The private group is now like the party,” Morony says. “Everyone’s sharing their stories, and the amazing photos and history that’s been captured there.”
But the campaigners also mean business. Members of the group are working to unpack the intricacies of South Australia’s planning laws and to coordinate support across music scenes and political divides. In addition to the rally, Morony and his fellow campaigners are collating resources to help supporters lobby their local MP and make formal submissions to SA’s state commission assessment panel (Scap), before consultation closes on 10 May.
They face an uphill battle. In a radio interview, the Labor state planning minister, Nick Champion, insisted the development would be impartially judged by Scap, an independent body. But he conceded that the proposed redevelopment would be “hard for the community”.
When asked whether the SA government would take steps to safeguard the pub’s contribution to the city’s music scene, a state government spokesperson told Guardian Australia: “It is important that Scap remains an independent committee to assess and determine development proposals in South Australia and not be influenced by politics.” The state government also said that a review of the state’s planning system had “no queries or concerns raised regarding live music venues”.
Adelaide’s lord mayor, Dr Jane Lomax-Smith, says the Crown and Anchor’s plight shows how “planning laws and heritage laws have unwittingly conspired to destroy the fabric of our city”.
Lomax-Smith, who was also lord mayor from 1997 to 2000 and a Labor cabinet minister from 2002 to 2010, says local heritage listings like the Crown and Anchor’s were designed to protect the integrity of the important buildings while granting owners flexibility to make interior updates. Instead, subsequent changes to height restrictions have led to a rash of “facadism”.
“If you can build 23 storeys on the site of a pub, the value of the pub is immaterial – it has no value,” she says. “Suddenly the value of that land skyrockets. What it has done is it has actually tipped the financial scales against low-scale buildings because no pub can compete.”
Lomax-Smith says while heritage advocates are often dismissed as “numpty dinosaurs”, the Save the Cranker campaign aren’t the “usual suspects”. At Sunday’s rally, banners calling for greater heritage protection appeared alongside poignant questions like: “Where will the goths go now?”
“It’s interesting that each generation seems to need a major disaster in the planning system to show any interest in heritage conservation,” Lomax-Smith says. “And I think that this is, to put it bluntly, a wake-up call and a vote-turner.”
For now the Cranker will continue trading. But after September a development clause in the lease means the pub and its community could be silenced with six months’ notice.
“Music’s in the DNA of this hotel, there’s no doubt about that,” Skipper says. “But you have a lot of people that use it as a sanctuary, as a meeting place, as their form of the church.
“We can protect the built form and the architecture but there’s so much more that lives and breathes behind those walls.”
Guardian Australia approached Wee Hur Holdings for comment but did not receive a reply.
