The Pentridge cinemas – tentatively named Palace Champ Street – will sit on the top floor of a two-level shopping centre to be built in the middle of the northern portion of the site by developer Shayher​ Group, which has ties to Taiwanese developer Pau Jar. Shayher bought the property from Valad Property Group in 2013 for $18 million. Valad had paid $42.5 million for the site when it bought it from the initial co-developer, Pentridge Piazza, 12 years earlier. According to Shayher spokesman Anthony Goh, the company has spent the past three years "decontaminating" the site, laying electrical cable and broadband, and generally preparing the infrastructure that will support the broader redevelopment. "It's not very glamorous, but it had to be done," Mr Goh said, declining to put a price on the works to date other than to say it was in the "tens of millions". Some of the bluestone cells in B Division will be incorporated into a hotel development. Credit:Scott.T

Planning applications will be submitted from November for a range of works, and Mr Goh said while he expected the approval process to take at least 12 months he didn't anticipate any issues given the proposed works were all in line with the masterplan initially drafted by Valad in 2009 and adopted, with some amendments, by Shayher in 2014. But some aspects of that plan have already hit snags, with community activists protesting at a proposal to demolish the historic bluestone H Block building and expressing concerns that a 19-storey apartment tower planned for the south-eastern corner of the block was far too high. Shayher's masterplan envisages transforming Pentridge "into a vibrant and sustainable mix of retail, commercial, entertainment, leisure/tourism and residential uses". Admirable, but easier said than done. The site was decommissioned as a prison by the state government in 1997 and first sold to developers in 1999, but the sheer scale of it – and the challenges of creating a vibrant new space while protecting the heritage of the site – have defeated more than one developer. An aerial view of a portion of the Pentridge site in Coburg.

Shayher claims its masterplan "will provide a planning, heritage and urban design framework that will guide an investment of >$1.0 billion within an 8-10-year development time frame". That's the kind of investment that could transform not just the site but Coburg as a whole. To some degree, Benjamin Zeccola – whose father, Palace founder Antonio Zeccola, ran a cinema on Sydney Road in the 1970s – is counting on it. Coburg has an older population, many born overseas, and that sits comfortably with the Palace audience (75 per cent of customers at the company's Balwyn cinema are aged over 50, for instance). But he is confident the Coburg population will soon look a lot more like that of neighbouring Brunswick and Fitzroy. "It looks like audiences in that area will change over the next five years. It's older now, but younger people with families will be moving in – and both represent opportunities for us." Education levels are likely to go up, too, and with that, he hopes, will come an appetite for something more refined than the typical multiplex experience.

"It's about having a glass of wine or a latte with the film, not being rushed in or out, really extending that magical ambience of cinema either side of the watching experience," he says. His cinemas will be relatively small, with large comfortable chairs. Porridge will not be on the menu. Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on Twitter @karlkwin