Western Sydney receives about 1.1% of Australia Council federal funding and 5.5% of Arts NSW funding, to support the communities that 10% of Australians call home. The Fleet Street Creative Precinct proposal seeks to reshape Western Sydney as the best place in the world to create and consume ideas - a living, creating precinct that will feed the visions of Australia's great thinkers of the 21st century - and beyond.

The Fleet Street Creative Precinct is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a truly unique resource that can reshape the economic and cultural face of Western Sydney. We believe that our proposals form a framework that can support thirty thousand new Creative Industries jobs within the precinct alone, generate another fifty thousand new jobs across Western Sydney, and set the direction for the new Western Sydney economy as the best place in the world for design, development, research, innovation and cultural enrichment.

In this first stage, focused on the development of the former Parramatta Girls and Female Factory buildings, we propose to adapt key heritage assets at the core of the Fleet Street Creative Precinct to house commercial and industrial ventures, by developing open working environments and multi-purpose spaces, including gallery, performance and studio spaces, that can be adapted to an ongoing community need.

We call this the Western Sydney Creative Hub.

The individuals and organisations within the Hub will create the Arts and Culture initiatives that will fill our theatres, galleries, museums and public spaces.  Our Creative Hub will physically cluster arts practitioners, not-for-profit community organisations and Arts Sector industry in working studio and office spaces within these heritage buildings.

It will house the next generation of tech start-ups, developing new ideas and innovations, nurturing the next great Australian commercial success story. We can take inspiration from sites like the Abbotsford Convent – sites that preserve the heritage, but serve first and foremost the needs of its Creative community to in turn enrich their city.

Our proposal is driven by the once-in-a-generation opportunity to establish, in the geographic centre of Greater Sydney, right in the middle of the Parramatta CBD, the world’s greatest place to create and consume new ideas. The adaptation of the existing heritage buildings to their new purpose as workshops, classrooms, performance spaces, studio spaces, office spaces and galleries will provide for the first thousand new jobs in a precinct that will, in the coming decades, see 30000 students and workers every single day, and tens of thousands of visitors from across Australia and the world in the Fleet Street Creative Precinct itself – and feeding tens of thousands more Creative jobs across Greater Western Sydney.

Heritage protection is important, but we must focus more on the next 200 years – that protecting heritage and telling stories is a secondary consideration to how this one-off resource can best service the residents of Greater Sydney as the world’s best place to Create.

We will protect the heritage. We will honour it. And we will now give this precinct new life.