Barangaroo is a relatively new commercial development at Sydney’s Darling Harbour, but the site has a history that dates back more than 6,000 years.
The area was originally home to the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. Its proximity to Sydney Harbour made it an ideal spot for fishing and hunting, and the first economic use of the region was by local Eora women, who would catch and collect fish in their canoes.
Darling Harbour, Sydney, circa 1900.
Soon after the colony of New South Wales was founded in 1788, the Barangaroo area flourished as a centre for maritime and industrial trades. Throughout the 1800s the area was completely transformed, with the construction of wharves, warehouses and other port infrastructure.
But with the advent of the shipping container in the late 1950s, the wharves soon became too small and ill-equipped for a modern port and they eventually became redundant. They fell into disrepair and lay idle until 2003, when the NSW government officially closed Sydney Harbour as a working port and transferred the task to Port Botany.
Around the same time, the government designated the site for redevelopment into parklands and commercial space, and Sydney’s new premier entertainment district began to take shape. A naming competition was held, and it was decided the site would be named Barangaroo after a Cammeraygal woman who was a leader of her people at the time of British colonisation.
In 2005 another competition was held, this one an international urban design competition for architects, but more about that later.
The development of Barangaroo has opened up this waterfront district to the public for the first time in over 100 years. Covering 22 hectares at the old East Darling Harbour docklands, Barangaroo is made up of three distinct but interconnected precincts with over half the site set aside as dedicated public open space. At the northern end is Barangaroo Reserve, a six-hectare harbour parkland offering spectacular views, extensive walking and cycling trails, idyllic coves, event spaces and peaceful picnic spots.
To the south sits Barangaroo’s commercial and residential precinct featuring upmarket restaurants, retail and premium waterfront office space. Barangaroo South includes Sydney’s first six-star luxury property, Crown Integrated Hotel and Resort, and the Barangaroo Ferry Wharf.
The final precinct linking north and south is Central Barangaroo, part of which is still being developed. Central Barangaroo will combine residential and commercial uses with civic and recreation spaces creating a vibrant, 24/7 mixed-use precinct.
Central Barangaroo will also see the completion of one of the world’s longest and most beautiful continuous waterfront walks. The walk will stretch along the entire Barangaroo waterfront, connecting Garden Island to the Sydney Fish Market.
You can see the twisting petals of Crown Towers Sydney from almost anywhere in the city. It’s Sydney’s fourth-tallest building at over 270 metres, with 75 floors of luxury hotel accommodation, high-end shops and a casino. It claims to have more world-class restaurants and bars than most small Sydney suburbs.
I wondered what I was looking at when I first saw Mov’in Bed, a so-called city beach outdoor cinema. With 280 tons of white sand, the largest outdoor screen in Australia and 150 plush queen-size beds, which you lie on to watch the movies, it puts a new take on outdoor theatre.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge can be seen peeping above the skyline to the left of the photo above.
Featuring new release films and classic favourites, you can order food and drink to your bed or enjoy pre-movie dinner and drinks across the road.
Barangaroo is home to more than 90 of what are described as Sydney’s best restaurants and bars, although some establishments in the city and inner suburbs that have been around a lot longer might dispute the “best” claim.
Nevertheless, there are some pretty good eateries there and we recently enjoyed lunch with two friends at love.fish, a popular seafood restaurant on the waterfront.
Barangaroo is one of the stops on the new Sydney Metro line. With the Metro you can travel from Sydney’s Central Station (extreme south of the city) to Barangaroo (extreme north of the city) in six minutes.
Sydney Metro is Australia’s largest public transport project, building, operating and maintaining a network of four metro lines with driverless trains, 46 stations and 113km of new metro rail. It has a target capacity of 40,000 customers per hour and will serve the new Western Sydney International Airport due to open next year.
Majority construction of Barangaroo was practically completed last year, and the development now accommodates more than 23,000 workers and residents and hosts thousands of visitors daily.
Construction on the final section of the Barangaroo foreshore is expected to start this year after plans for the $2 billion-plus project were finally approved after lengthy delays.
The NSW government has adopted the most recent plans from its development partner to build seven blocks of up to 10 storeys at Central Barangaroo, creating a mixed-use precinct of 150 luxury apartments, a hotel, shops, offices and eateries above the metro station, all due for completion in 2030.
But not everyone is happy. The overall project has been controversial from the outset and at almost every stage of development, following the design competition mentioned earlier. In 2015, Architecture Au wrote that the emerging Barangaroo was a mess of colossal proportions, the result of successive government failures.
“The most obvious failure is scale,” it said. “Every building is too large, too high, too intrusive and too little respectful of the public domain it exploits. The most extreme instance is the 275m tall hotel/VIP casino for Crown Entertainment. Everything about it is selfish and narcissistic: its excessive height, public exclusion, and monopolisation of harbour views for a wealthy few. Barangaroo’s potential – how it might have met the broader social needs of community and added considerable vitality to Sydney – has largely been undermined by treating East Darling Harbour as yet another arena for consumerism. This raises the larger question of the role of the architect in a period of mindless privatization and consumerism, when issues of energy and climate change loom large.” Wow! Tell us what you really think.
More recently, referring to approval of the final section, a long-time advocate for Sydney Harbour’s public parklands, said the concept plans were “as exceedingly bad as before and a catastrophe that should be stopped.
“The token three-storey reduction in building height on a small part of the northern end does almost nothing to ameliorate its devastating impacts, which will ruin views from old colonial Sydney.”
So there you have it. But major developments are almost always contentious at some point in their progress; come and judge for yourself.
Main photos © Judy Barford
Title picture: Moez Haider/Pexels
Historical picture: Wikimedia Commons
