We ‘revitalise’ Parramatta Road at our peril

I grew up on Parramatta Road. Twice a day I crossed it, to the station and school beyond, and caught buses down its bleary length to early morning band or sport; too early for the trains to be running. Later, still-bleary, though nocturnal rides on the heaven-sent Nightriders after a night out in the city, with their drivers of saintly patience winding a stolid way west in the pre-dawn murk.

I grew and moved away – first states, then countries. Then I came back. I live now a few kilometres closer to the city than where I began, but still on Parramatta Road – the one thing that never changes.

Yet earlier this month, the long-awaited rezoning of Parramatta Road was announced – 8000 new dwellings in a three kilometre stretch from Leichardt to Camperdown, terminating at the last scrap of industrial land in inner Sydney.

A scrap whose productivity and protection was, until the announcement at least, a key plank of the city’s innovation strategy.

The strip, according to the NSW Planning Minister Paul Scully, is “tired”. “It’s time we stopped talking and start getting on with building,” he says. On whose ruins is the building to be done?

A cursory audit combining Google Maps, an afternoon walk and the experience of thousands of hours spent travelling its length, reveals, in just this three-kilometre stretch:

• seven pubs and two breweries, most of which regularly show live music. Crowbar, near Norton Street, is the foundation of Sydney’s heavy music scene, the last place with gigs on every night of the week
• dozens of restaurants, from local stalwarts like Surjit’s, where my parents ate in the 90s, to buzzy up-and-comers like Snacky Chans, slinging sushi and cocktails since 2021
• at least seven art galleries, studios and workshops
• five musical instrument stores, three recording studios, a record shop and at least four suppliers and repairers of electronic music equipment
• 10 graphic design, web design, print and video studios
• the Australian headquarters of IDE Group, a European medtech giant, which designs and fabricates medical equipment from a warehouse next to Taverners Hill Station
• specialty retail galore; from Euroespresso, bean roasters, importers of fine Italian coffee equipment and home to Sydney’s best arancini, to Gifts of Mercy, where local artists sell clothing and art to punks, goths and metalheads

In short, a heaving, steaming mass of small, independent, creative uses unsurpassed anywhere in Sydney.

What links these businesses, almost down to the last, is that they cannot exist anywhere else. Where creativity and character have been cleared from the inner city, they find a home on Parramatta Road.

Too long and too hilly for much walking, forming the boundary of the suburbs along its length, which look inwards, toward their own local streets and shopping centres, and spanning the dead zone between where people live and where they work, Parramatta Road has existed in its own Sydney.

A Sydney outside capitalism, where there was no incentive to sanitise, to commodify, to speculate in one of the most sanitised, commodified and speculated-upon urban environments in the world.

Where, as a result, it was affordable to try; where failure would leave a boarded-up shopfront, but it would not destroy the one who filled it, who would live to learn, grow and try again.

Or they would flourish, finding, as so many have, that the community they serve has nowhere else to go.

When Eamon Waterford, chief executive officer of the Committee for Sydney calls Parramatta Road a “boulevard of broken dreams,” it is worth asking whose dreams are being broken. Surely not the children with their parents, buying, as I did, their first instrument at Sax & Woodwind. Feeling the keys, imagining the music – there could be nothing more hopeful.

Nor the volunteers that have run Jura Books, Sydney’s only radical bookstore, since 1977. Nor the bands keeping the dream alive at Crowbar, nor the bakers, baristas and chefs swarming the strip, who have taken a punt on below-market rent.

No – the lamented dreams are those of developers, financiers and profiteers, whose juggernaut has smashed through this city, killing its spontaneity, fragmenting and marketising its vitality, and subordinating all lives to its enrichment.

Where diversity, accessibility and affordability are slogans, but actually diverse, accessible and affordable spaces like Parramatta Road must be “transformed.”

They may have their wish. Parramatta Road may one day be just another curated, sterilised strip – a King Street, Oxford Street, or Glebe Point Road – desperately marketing any waft of past bohemian glory.

But its stubbornness, its very existence right now is a protest in a city that has lost so much to a rapacious property sector, sent into overdrive by the disingenuous rhetoric of for-profit development as a solution to the housing crisis.

It would do well to take a good, hard look at what will be lost. The least-Sydney part of Sydney, and all the better for it.

---

---