Belmont doesn’t announce itself with sandstone terraces or a postcard foreshore. It announces itself with the thump of hooves on turf at Ascot Racecourse, the ghost-shapes of old kiln chimneys rising over Grandstand Road, and the Belmont Forum car park filling up before nine on a Saturday morning. This is a suburb that grew out of clay, market gardens and horse racing rather than harbour views, and it’s mid-transformation again right now, with a 38-hectare stretch of its own racecourse earmarked for one of the biggest waterfront redevelopments the eastern suburbs have seen in decades.
Belmont Suburb Boundary Map
Belmont sits within the City of Belmont, on the south bank of the Swan River opposite Maylands and Bayswater, bordering Ascot, Cloverdale, Kewdale, Redcliffe and Rivervale, about 8km east of the Perth CBD.
Quick Facts
| LGA | City of Belmont |
| Region | Perth Metropolitan, Inner eastern corridor |
| Postcode | 6104 |
| Population | 6,959 (2021 Census), up from 6,785 in 2016 |
| Demographics | Median age 36; median weekly household income $1,557; average 2.3 people per household; 44.5% of dwellings rented, well above the WA average of 27.3% |
| Attractions | RAAF Headquarters Bunker (former), Tomato Lake, Old Bristile Kilns chimneys, Ascot Racecourse boundary; Belmont Forum, Ruth Faulkner Library and Belmont Museum are next door in Cloverdale |
| Median House Price | $919,250; Median Unit Price $580,000 (REIWA, 12 months to May 2026) |
| Median Rent | $350/week (2021 Census benchmark) |
| Dwellings | 3,418 (2021 Census) |
| Transport | Redcliffe Station on the Airport Line on the suburb’s eastern edge; bus routes 39, 270, 293, 935, 940 and CircleRoute services 998/999 |
| Distance to Perth CBD | Approximately 8km (15-20 minutes by car); Perth Airport is a 5-minute drive |
Sources: ABS 2021 and 2016 Census QuickStats, Belmont WA (SAL50105); REIWA suburb profile, accessed July 2026.
Who It Suits
Belmont suits renters and first-time buyers chasing genuine transit connectivity over polish: with 44.5% of dwellings rented against a state average of 27.3%, this is one of the more renter-heavy suburbs in the inner-eastern corridor, and prices still sit well under the Perth median. It also suits anyone who wants to be five minutes from the airport and fifteen from the city without the price tag that usually comes with that kind of convenience. It’s a harder sell for buyers chasing a finished, gentrified streetscape. Some pockets are visibly still catching up, and the flight path overhead is a genuine consideration, not a footnote.
What Makes Belmont Special
Long before Belmont had a name, this stretch of the Swan River’s south bank was Beeloo country, held by a Noongar family group led by a man named Munday, well known to early colonists. The site later developed as Ascot Racecourse was known to the Noongar as Ngattaba. In April 1833, after the shooting of Yagan’s brother Domjum during an attempted break-in at a settler’s store, Munday joined Midgegooroo and Yagan in a reprisal killing at Bull Creek. All three were declared outlaws with bounties on their heads; Midgegooroo and Yagan were killed, but Munday successfully appealed his outlaw status directly to Governor Irwin, explaining the wrongs colonists had inflicted on his people. It’s a confronting, largely untold piece of the suburb’s early history, and one the City of Belmont’s own museum now documents openly.
European Belmont was shaped almost entirely by one family. John Wall Hardey arrived on the ship Tranby in 1830, and over the following decades he and his son Robert Davey Hardey acquired most of the district, including Grove Farm and, in 1854, Belmont Farm itself, the property that gave the suburb its name. Robert built the eleven-room Belmont House in 1880, later reborn as the Sandringham Hotel. The first race meeting was held on Hardey’s Grove Farm in 1848, and the site chosen for a permanent racecourse on the same property grew into what’s now Ascot Racecourse, home of the Perth Cup, Western Australia’s premier horse race, run every New Year’s Day since 1887. Legendary local trainer-owner-jockey George Towton, known as “King George,” won six Perth Cups from a home called Towton Lodge before his death in 1906.
The other defining industry was clay. William and Albert Sugars opened brickworks on the Redcliffe riverbank in 1896, supplying bricks for most of early Ascot, and in 1904 councillor Richard Kirton opened Perth’s first industrial pottery on Grandstand Road. Kirton went bankrupt within two years, but the factory passed through several owners before merging in 1938 to become Brisbane & Wunderlich, one of WA’s best-known manufacturers. The kilns and chimneys that remain today, heritage-listed as the Old Bristile Kilns (just over the boundary in neighbouring Ascot but visually and historically inseparable from Belmont), are still a genuine local landmark.
Is It Worth Visiting?
Belmont isn’t a day-trip destination in the way Fremantle or the hills are, and it doesn’t pretend to be. But if you time a visit around Perth Cup Day (New Year’s Day) or a Saturday race meeting at Ascot, walk the Tomato Lake loop afterwards, and finish with a browse through the small, purpose-built Belmont Museum next door in Cloverdale, you’ll come away with a genuinely different read on Perth’s east than the CBD gives you. For most visitors it’s a half-day add-on rather than a standalone trip, best paired with a look at the Belmont Park redevelopment site to see where the suburb is headed next.
What’s It Like Living Here
Growth in Belmont was slow and patchy for its first sixty years. Nineties subdivisions like Ascot Garden Estate (1895) and Cloverdale Estate (1910, carved from the southern part of Hardey’s Location 32) sold better than most, but much of the district stayed bush and sand track well into the 1900s. Migrant Frank Larter, who arrived just before the First World War, remembered “hundreds of streets surveyed and named on plans” with “very little actual sign of the streets,” and pioneer families kept pigs, poultry and goats to get by. Chinese market gardeners, drawn by the swampy river-flat land that defeated conventional cropping, worked plots along Hardey Road and Belgravia Street from the 1890s, a detail the suburb’s own heritage record preserves but Wikipedia doesn’t carry. The Belmont Road Board was finally formed in 1898 after a community campaign, becoming the Shire of Belmont in 1960 and the City of Belmont in 1979.
The real transformation came after the Second World War: Belmont’s population went from around 5,700 in 1947 to 16,700 just six years later, prompting the 1950 creation of three new suburbs, Kewdale, Cloverdale and Newburn, carved out of the original district (Newburn was later absorbed into an expanding Perth Airport). Industrial development followed the housing boom, with 80 hectares north of Alexander Road zoned for the Belmont Industrial Area in 1951, an employment base that still anchors much of the suburb’s economy today. A 2021 median age of 36 (up from 34 in 2016) and a median household income of $1,557 a week describe a suburb that’s ageing gently and holding steady financially, even as its rental share climbs.
Realty Market
Belmont’s median house price sits at $919,250 with units at $580,000, according to REIWA figures for the 12 months to May 2026, comfortably below the Perth metro median. The 2021 Census tells a more textured story than the headline price: only 21.5% of dwellings are owned outright (against 29.2% across WA) and 44.5% are rented (against 27.3% across WA), making Belmont a genuinely renter-dominated market by Perth standards. Housing stock is 75.4% separate houses, but the 18.4% share of semi-detached, row and townhouse dwellings is notably higher than the WA average of 13.0%, reflecting steady infill development on the suburb’s older, larger blocks. Median weekly rent sat at $350 at the last Census and median monthly mortgage repayments at $1,733.
Hospitals
Belmont has no hospital of its own today, though it once did: Hill 60, a heritage-listed homestead in neighbouring Rivervale, was converted into Western Australia’s first St John of God Hospital in 1935. For current care, Royal Perth Hospital is the nearest major public tertiary hospital, and St John of God Mount Lawley Hospital, on the northern side of the river, is the closest private option.
Education
Belmont City College is the local comprehensive public high school, with a Department of Education catchment covering Ascot, Cloverdale, Kewdale, Redcliffe and Rivervale as well as Belmont itself. Feeder primary schools include Belmay, Belmont, Cloverdale, Redcliffe and Tranby Primary Schools, giving families a genuine choice of nearby public options without needing to look outside the local network.
Industry and Work Life
The Belmont Industrial Area, zoned in 1951 and still centred north of Alexander Road, remains a significant local employer, a direct descendant of the brickworks and pottery trade that built the suburb in the first place. Census figures show 62.0% of employed residents commute by car as driver (68.8% including passengers), broadly in line with the WA average, while 8.8% use public transport, including 6.1% by bus, a respectable share for an outer-middle suburb and one helped considerably by the Airport Line station on Belmont’s doorstep.
Attractions
The RAAF Headquarters Bunker (former), a partially subterranean structure at 81-91 Leake Street built in 1943 and also known as the Belmont SES Bunker, is Belmont’s own State Register-listed heritage site (Place No. 16785, registered 2006), a rare surviving piece of wartime infrastructure genuinely within the suburb’s own boundary. Tomato Lake, a groundwater-fed lake straddling the Belmont-Kewdale boundary, offers a 1.8km sealed loop popular with walkers, joggers and dog owners, and hosts a large resident ibis colony nesting on its island. The Old Bristile Kilns chimneys on Grandstand Road, heritage-listed at State level (Place No. 868), sit just over the boundary in neighbouring Ascot but remain visually and historically inseparable from Belmont’s identity. Ascot Racecourse, immediately over the boundary, hosts the Perth Cup every New Year’s Day. Worth knowing: despite the branding, Belmont’s best-known civic and retail landmarks, Belmont Forum, the Ruth Faulkner Library and the Belmont Museum, are all physically located next door in Cloverdale, not Belmont itself.
Parks, Greenspaces and Other Public Amenities
Tomato Lake and Grove Farm Reserve (bowling green and tennis courts since 1963) anchor Belmont’s own everyday green space, along with Selby Park, several of them developed during the City of Belmont’s 1950s population boom. For a full leisure centre with pools and a gym, residents head next door to the Belmont Oasis Leisure Centre in Cloverdale. The Swan River foreshore, managed jointly with the DBCA-run Swan Canning Riverpark, includes protected shoreline areas where boat speeds were deliberately reduced to curb erosion and protect wildlife habitat.
Transport
Redcliffe Station on the Airport Line sits on Belmont’s eastern edge, putting the suburb 15 minutes from Perth Station and just 3 minutes from Airport Central, serving Terminals 1 and 2. The station’s bus interchange runs seven regular routes, including Route 39 to Elizabeth Quay via Belmont Forum, Route 270 to High Wycombe via Belmont Avenue, Route 293 to High Wycombe via Great Eastern Highway, and Routes 935, 940, 998 and 999 covering the rest of the suburb. Perth CBD is approximately 8km away (15-20 minutes by car), and Perth Airport is a 5-minute drive, a rare combination of proximity to both that few other Perth suburbs can match.
Future Growth
The single biggest change coming to Belmont is the Belmont Park Racecourse Redevelopment, converting 38 hectares of riverfront racecourse land into a mixed-use precinct under a Local Structure Plan approved by the Western Australian Planning Commission in 2013. Precinct A allows townhouses and apartment buildings up to 19 storeys; Precinct B is planned as a high-density, high-rise mixed commercial, residential and leisure zone incorporating a small public marina; Precinct C retains the racetrack, grandstand and stabling. Supporting infrastructure, including a new footbridge over the Graham Farmer Freeway and upgrades to the Victoria Park Drive Bridge intersection, is already complete. It’s the kind of large-scale, government-backed redevelopment that tends to reprice a suburb over a decade rather than overnight, and it sits directly on Belmont’s own doorstep.
The Honest Verdict
Belmont trades polish for genuine substance: a working-class industrial and racing history deeper than almost any other eastern suburb, a train station that gets you to both the CBD and the airport in minutes, and a renter-friendly price point that’s becoming harder to find this close to Perth. The trade-off is real. Flight noise from Perth Airport is a fact of life here, not a rumour, and the local sentiment on the ground is candid about rundown pockets and inconsistent streetscapes in parts of the suburb. What tips it in Belmont’s favour is timing: the Belmont Park Racecourse Redevelopment is a genuinely major, already-approved project on the suburb’s own riverfront, and suburbs rarely stay this affordable once that kind of investment starts landing. For buyers and renters prioritising connectivity and upside over a finished look, now is the moment to take Belmont seriously.
FAQ
What was Belmont called before it was Belmont?
The district took its name from Belmont Farm, established by Captain Francis Byrne on Swan Location 34 in 1830. Locally, the suburb was known as Belmont Park for much of the 20th century (the local road board was even called the Belmont Park Road Board from 1907) before formally becoming simply Belmont in 1968.
Is Belmont Park Racecourse being redeveloped?
Yes. A 38-hectare Local Structure Plan for the racecourse precinct was approved by the WA Planning Commission in 2013, allowing residential towers up to 19 storeys, commercial and marina development, while retaining the working racetrack and grandstand. Supporting road and bridge infrastructure is already complete.
What is the nearest train station to Belmont?
Redcliffe Station, on the Airport Line, sits on Belmont’s eastern edge and connects to Perth Station in around 15 minutes and to Airport Central in about 3 minutes.
Is Belmont Forum actually in Belmont?
No. Belmont Forum, along with the Ruth Faulkner Library and Belmont Museum, is physically located in neighbouring Cloverdale, even though all three are closely tied to Belmont’s identity and branding.
Is Belmont a good suburb to live in?
It depends what you’re optimising for. Belmont offers genuine transport connectivity, comparative affordability and a deep local history, but it’s a renter-heavy market (44.5% of dwellings, well above the WA average) with real flight noise and some visibly uneven streetscapes. It suits buyers and renters prioritising location and value over a fully finished look.
References
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2021 and 2016 Census QuickStats, Belmont WA (SAL50105 / SSC50105), abs.gov.au
- REIWA, Belmont suburb profile, reiwa.com.au
- Wikipedia, Belmont, Western Australia; City of Belmont; List of State Register of Heritage Places in the City of Belmont, en.wikipedia.org
- City of Belmont, “A History of Opportunity” and “Our Heritage, Our Story,” Museum Heritage Series, belmont.wa.gov.au
- WA Government Gazette, Western Australian Legislation, legislation.wa.gov.au
- Heritage Council of Western Australia, inHerit State Heritage Office database, inherit.dplh.wa.gov.au
- Western Australian Government, Belmont Park redevelopment, buildingfortomorrow.wa.gov.au
- Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, Swan Canning Riverpark, dbca.wa.gov.au
- Transperth, Journey Planner and Airport Line timetable, transperth.wa.gov.au
- Homely, Belmont WA 6104 suburb profile and local reviews, homely.com.au
- Belmont City College, belmontcc.wa.edu.au
- Perth Racing, Ascot Racecourse and Perth Cup, perthracing.com.au
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