Lang Walker has been praised in death as a pioneering property developer who changed the face of Sydney and helped reorient the city’s future toward the west.
Walker Corporation developed some of central Sydney’s most recognised locations, including King Street Wharf in the 1990s, Broadway shopping centre and the Finger Wharf at Woolloomooloo.
Lang Walker at the Rhodes shopping and residential site in 2006.Credit: Louie Douvis
However, it was Walker’s work decontaminating former industrial land at Rhodes, and transforming Sydney’s second CBD with his more recent Parramatta Square project, that cemented the billionaire’s legacy as a city-shaper.
“Parramatta Square is clearly his most recent crowning achievement,” said Rick Graf, development director at property group Billbergia. “It has changed the central city for the better and forever.”
The advent of Parramatta as a second commercial centre for Sydney came in part by Walker trading residential development rights in return for long-term, guaranteed occupation by state government agencies, which began moving west in 2019, just before the pandemic.
“Not many people would do that, or have the vision to think that,” says Tom Forrest, head of developer lobby group Urban Taskforce. “It was a fundamental change to the landscape of Sydney. He made the second city real.”
Former NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet (3rd from left) and Lang Walker (right) attending a topping out ceremony at Parramatta Square in 2021.Credit: Kate Geraghty
Forrest also praises Walker for his work in Rhodes, which is now a successful example of high-density development around a train station – the kind of transit-oriented development the new state government has been so keen to accelerate.
Walker decontaminated the ex-industrial land at what is now the southern end of the Rhodes precinct, and developed the early residential towers and shopping centre. More recently, Billbergia has developed the northern end of Rhodes, and adjacent Wentworth Point linked by the Bennelong Bridge.
“[Walker] was responsible for the remediation of the toxic waste dump which was the Union Carbide site,” says Forrest. “That is city-changing. That was the beginning of Sydney – rather than turning its back on the rivers – instead starting to build a city which faced the river and embraced it.
“Rather than putting the toxic factories like James Hardie and Union Carbide and Shell along the riverscape, and basically having all of the housing looking inward not outward, he was the first to say, ‘No no no, if we remediate this we can build great housing with great vistas’.”
A view of Rhodes from Wentworth Point in 2022. Credit: Brook Mitchell
Walker continued his western focus with a multibillion-dollar 2023 deal with Blacktown City Council to develop a new health precinct and deliver 5000 jobs. That project became controversial because of the involvement of neurosurgeon Charlie Teo in one part of the planned precinct, known as the Blacktown Brain and Spinal Institute.
Also divisive was Walker’s massive greenfield residential project south-west of Sydney in Appin, slated for about 13,000 new homes. The former Coalition government said it would fast-track the project and Labor, after taking office last March, approved the rezoning last year.
That is despite Premier Chris Minns previously saying Sydney needs to build “up, not out”, and although the government has also said it will need to facilitate both urban infill and new housing on the urban fringe.
Forrest describes the growth area to Sydney’s south-west as Walker’s “next frontier” – one which will now be executed without the company’s co-founder.
“If anyone drove that agenda to make it happen, he was the one at the very front line,” Forrest says. “There are always critics, but he was the one making it happen.”
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