Someone posted a photo online recently of those Victorian terraces near Richmond Station, the ones on Punt Road with the massive billboard plastered across the facade. The question was simple enough: what’s the story, do people actually live there?

The answers that came back were not simple at all.

Turns out the building was, for a long time, a brothel. Legal, licensed, operating. And the comments section filled up pretty quickly with people who had personal connections to the place: former workers, former neighbours, a bloke who wired up the red light above the back entrance as a seventeen-year-old apprentice electrician and clearly never forgot it.