The Broken Hill Hotel has opened the Two Mile Spring Bar, an alfresco venue at the Victoria Park pub with two 13-foot LED screens for live sport, new landscaping and seating, and a reworked menu of pub favourites, share plates, and local produce. The hotel is calling it one of Perth’s largest heritage pub alfresco spaces.

A freshwater spring once sat beside the site, about two miles from Perth’s original General Post Office, and travellers heading between Perth and Albany stopped there to water their horses and rest before continuing on. It became known as the Two Mile Spring, and historians credit it with influencing the bend in Albany Highway that still sits opposite the hotel.

“The spring was once a place where people naturally came together,” said Trevor Vaughan, a former Town of Victoria Park Mayor and long-standing patron of the pub. “More than a century later, that’s exactly what this venue is about. Whether you’re meeting family for lunch, catching up with friends over a drink or watching the footy, it’s continuing that tradition of bringing people together.”

The spring disappeared long ago. The hotel has stood on the site since 1898, designed by Robert McMaster, who went on to become Victoria Park’s first Mayor, and built for Alfred Russell, who became its second.