I’m a proud Melbourne girl. I went to school in the black-and-red suburb, I had to learn the names of the city streets before I was allowed to go to town with friends, and Melbourne has always been home even when I lived in other states. But it wasn’t until I did the Characters and Spaces walking tour of my home town that I saw the message on the wall of the Centreway Arcade, the telephone signs in the Campbell Arcade and the old hotel name on the side of a building in Swanston Street.

The tour focuses on one big city block – between Elizabeth, Collins, Swanston and Flinders Streets – and was developed by university lecturer and graphic designer Stephen Banham for this years’ State of Design Festival. While the festival is over, you can do the Characters and Spaces excursion any time by printing the program from the RMIT website.

Banham says it took him four months of research to plot a course that tells 17 different stories and ‘peels back (the) layers of graphic design’.

“I intended to make people see an area they think is familiar in a new light” Banham says. ‘It’s about storytelling. I wanted to tell people the stories behind the things they take for granted”.

Banham says the first step in developing the route – which he proclaims ‘is not a standard walking tour’ was settling on just one block in a city where notable examples of graphic design exist on every street. “It wasn’t about pretty pictures. It was all about the story behind the things we see every day” he says. “Once we settled on a block, we had to track down the people who were involved in creating the things we were going to feature – forgotten architects and graphic designers. The tour features aspects of architecture, graphic design, industrial design and even sculpture. It’s about history, sport and economics and everything that feeds into those things”.

When I set out on the tour, on a windy winter’s day when the sky was threatening to dump a shower on the city, I was expecting to be dragged around the busy streets behind a guide who would waffle on about obscure historical facts. But it didn’t take long before I was completely engaged and looking to spot the hidden signs that were being pointed out. While I was being shown around by the man who created the tour, Banham didn’t tell me anything that wasn’t in the yellow program, so a self-guided tour would be just as much fun.

We started in Centre Place and after weaving around the tourists looking at the walls of graffiti, we climbed the stairs in Centreway Arcade to the first floor bridge that let us look at the brass letters stuck to the end wall. I was amazed to discover the words formed a sentence ‘we live in a society that sets an inordinate value on consumer goods and services’ which seems like an ironic statement to appear in a shopping precinct.

We left the arcade, turned right,and stopped outside Newspaper House where we learnt about the colourful mural on the building’s façade as well as a collection of corporate logos from across the ages and the gothic tower on the Manchester Unity Building. Around the corner in Swanston Street was my favourite stop, and only because of the story behind the building that was featured. High up on a nondescript wall was a piece of steel tube that had been wound into the words ‘The Graham Hotel’ to mark the place where Carlton & United Breweries built a luxury hotel – it has air-conditioning – for the 1956 Olympic Games.

Another stop took us underground into Campbell Arcade, also built for the Melbourne Games, and Banham included it on the tour because the site “offers a glimpse into what Melbourne would have looked like over 50 years ago”. At other points we heard about the Emirates and the Commonwealth Bank logos, the sign outside the City Library and the electronic message board on the roof of the Young and Jackson Hotel.

Banham has also included some ‘adventure questions’ to help walkers get more out of the journey and although the quiz was included to engage children, it also provides a challenge for adults.

But I won’t spoil it for you. Go the RMIT site and print the guide, put on your walking shoes and set out to discover something new about a corner of Melbourne.