Central Park

For 150 years, the old Kent Street Brewery was hidden behind tall, imposing walls.

“Until its recent closure, a sense of mystery prevailed around the Central Park site. What lay within the brewery walls?” asks Jenny Turpin, artist & curator of Central Park’s Public Art collection.

“This vast enclosure appeared as a city unto itself, an enigmatic place of alchemical fermentations, with giant vats and aging buildings. It was a place where trucks would come and go, but the outsider would never venture,” says Turpin.

Established in 1835, and later acquired by Carlton & United Breweries in 1983, the old Kent Street Brewery gradually expanded to cover 5.8 hectares of land, which Frasers Property Australia acquired in 2007.

To preserve its legacy, Frasers Property has engaged a team of archaeologists, heritage consultants and architects specialising in urban conservation, such as Tzannes Associates (Sydney), which is now transforming the site’s flagship brewery building and yard into a public venue of “spectacular dimensions”.

“We have created one of the great new rooms in Sydney. A whole new roof and northern façade will create a really interesting building, where new and old technologies work together,” says Alec Tzannes, Director of Tzannes Associates in Sydney.

Inside the old brewery building, machinery and equipment will be restored as a tribute to invention and industry. Below ground, a tri-generation plant will supply Central Park residents with a source of sustainable energy emitting gentle wafts of steam through the old brewery stack.

“I have always been very interested in the passage of time in buildings. To be able to reuse a significant industrial development and make a spectacular space, and blend new and old architecture – it is a brief from heaven,” says Tzannes.

On Kensington Street, Sydney architects Tonkin Zulaikha Greer are revitalising terrace houses, pubs and warehouses into a bustling laneway for cafes, shop fronts and galleries, while across the site, 33 separate heritage items will ensure the story of this ‘city within a city’ is never forgotten.