Council Pass Motion To Accelerate Town Hall Square Construction

Lord Mayor Clover Moore has announced work on the Town Hall Square will start sooner than expected.

At a council meeting on Monday night, the City of Sydney Council unanimously endorsed her motion asking the City to accelerate the delivery of Town Hall Square as part of their 2025/26 budget, with demolition to start in the next few years.

The idea of a public square opposite Town Hall has been thrown around by various City of Sydney councils for fifty years, with former lord mayor Doug Sutherland devising the plan in 1982.

“For more than three decades, the City of Sydney under successive Lord Mayors has been progressively acquiring properties opposite Town Hall to create space for a future Town Hall Square,” said Moore in a statement to social media.

“That’s because Sydney is Australia’s global city, and like other major cities, it needs large welcoming civic spaces for growing residential and working populations and for millions of local, national and international visitors.”

In 2023, councillors were advised to extend the commercial and retail leases in the area until 2035, in order to give the council more time to buy the required properties after the financial impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic.

However, due to the ages of the buildings, the costs to maintain and upgrade them so they comply with current standards was becoming prohibitive.

“Investing in buildings we intend to demolish for the future Town Hall Square is not prudent,” said Moore. “Therefore, last night I asked Council to re-evaluate and adapt to changing conditions by moving the project forward in this year’s budget.”

A new chapter in a long saga?

Moore was criticised for delaying action on the Square in 2023.

“It’s often said that failing to plan is planning to fail, and it certainly has been in the case of the new Town Hall Square under this Lord Mayor,” Councillor Linda Scott told CityHub two years ago.

“We don’t have a costed, public plan, and a timetable, for the new square, and as a result the timeframe has been pushed out again and again with ad hoc decisions like the one taken by the Lord Mayor and her team last May, to extend the leases for the properties on the land needed for the Square out to 2035.”

Council papers have estimated that the project will cost more than $200 million dollars, and will require funding from the state and federal governments.

Terminating the leases of the current occupants- such the Woolworths on the north-west corner- would also significantly reduce the council’s income, so its desire to extend the leases until the latest possible moment is understandable.