Alan Lewis

Alan Lewis became involved with the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) and the Royal Melbourne Show professionally in the early 1990s as part of the redevelopment of the showgrounds. But prior to his professional involvement, Alan had fond memories of attending the Show.

I must have been about four or five years old. I can remember sitting on my father’s shoulder at the showbags hall and I can remember this vast crowd of people.

In the early 1990s Alan’s company Lewis Mcnaughton was approached to investigate the possibility of building a velodrome at the showgrounds. While the velodrome project did not go ahead, Alan recalls, ‘it was the start of quite a long relationship’.

Lewis Mcnaughton was engaged by RASV to undertake several different projects, including the design and development of the Showgrounds Exhibition Centre (forerunner of the new Victoria Pavilion) and the creation a master plan for the redevelopment of the showgrounds.

In all the work that Alan did for RASV he was always conscious of maintaining as much as possible the integrity, heritage and history of the Show, while ensuring it remained viable and had a future.

We interviewed about 300 focus groups. The purpose of that was really trying to understand what their requirements were to run a competition, what they needed during the Show … It was really trying to understand the very guts of what it was all about.

The redevelopment master plan produced by Lewis Mcnaughton took over a year to complete and presented RASV with a detailed blueprint of how to develop state-of-the-art showgrounds that would provide year-round exhibition facilities. It included detailed research, which comprised a comprehensive narrative on each and every Royal Melbourne Show competition and activity, the facilities each of these competitors and activities required, as well as a record of all the key buildings, structures, streets, avenues and artworks including statues and monuments.

In undertaking all this research, Alan recalls: ‘I never realised the extent and the passion of a lot of these smaller competitors – the pigeon fanciers [for example]’. The task Alan faced was huge, but his approach was about trying to understand the philosophy behind the whole event.

The Lewis Mcnaughton master plan became a significantly important document for RASV that provided a clear and detailed record of the nature of the Show prior to the redevelopment. By the time the redevelopment happened in 2006, it was delivered under a public-private partnership (PPP) with a new state government. Funding challenges resulted in compromises and Alan’s involvement became more limited. The redevelopment that occurred was quite different from the master plan prepared by Lewis Mcnaughton, but Alan feels that ultimately ‘it was all worthwhile’.

It's no good just looking at what the RAS are good at is recording each year the Show in detail and passing on to the next generation, and so they get a running-sheet. It's good if you want to carry forward on a slow pace of change but it was facing rapid change, so we had to move away from 'well this is what we did last year, if we tweak it here, we'll do it this year', we had to take an entirely new way and even question how do you do a competition … If you asked them what they wanted, everybody came up with an unaffordable brief. We had to take that unaffordable brief and try and get it to something that could work and that was a tough task.