the following year full responsible government with a two house Parliament. For Melbourne, the major consequence was the magnificent edifice of Parliament House, Melbourne, which was started in December 1855 and extended to the present state between 1856 and 1929; it was not completed to the original design. The boom fuelled by gold and wool lasted through the 1860s and '70s. Victoria suffered from an acute labour shortage despite its steady influx of migrants, and this pushed up wages until they were the highest in the world. Victoria was known as "the working man's paradise" in these years. The Stonemasons Union won the eight-hour day in 1856 and celebrated by building the enormous Melbourne Trades Hall in Carlton. 1880s and 1890s expansion Melbourne's population reached 280,000 in 1880 and 445,000 in 1889. For a time it was the second-largest city in the British Empire, after London. During the boom, Melbourne had reputedly become the richest city in the world, In terms of area, Melbourne was already one of the largest cities in the world. Rather than building high-density apartment blocks like European cities, Melbourne expanded in all directions in the characteristic Australian suburban sprawl so Australians were afforded their Australian Dream of a "quarter acre block" in the suburbs, much like the American model. The middle classes lived in detached villas on large blocks of land, while the working class lived in reasonably comfortable cottages in the northern and western suburbs, and older areas like Fitzroy and Collingwood became slums. Most of the new heavy industry was concentrated in the western suburbs. The wealthy built huge mansions beside the sea or in the picturesque Yarra Valley. The new suburbs were serviced by networks of trains and trams which were among the largest and most modern in the world. Melbourne's civic pride was demonstrated by the huge edifice of the Royal Exhibition Building, built in 1880 to house the Melbourne International Exhibition. In the 1880s the long boom culminated in a frenzy of speculation and rapid inflation of land prices known as the Land Boom. Governments shared in the wealth and ploughed money into urban infrastructure, particularly railways. Huge fortunes were built on speculation, and Victorian business and politics became notorious for corruption. English banks lent freely to colonial speculators, adding to the mountain of debt on which the boom was built. 1891 economic bust In 1891 the inevitable happened: a