Sydney Central Station: Haymarket and Ultimo

Sydney’s Central Station sits on the southern edge of the city centre, within a 15-minute walk of the Chinese Garden of Friendship, the indoor stalls of Paddy’s Markets in Haymarket, and two landmark buildings in Ultimo and Chippendale: Frank Gehry’s folded-brick business school and Jean Nouvel’s plant-covered One Central Park.

The Chinese Garden of Friendship’s lake and pagoda

The Chinese Garden of Friendship fills a walled corner at the southern end of Darling Harbour, about 15 minutes on foot from Central through Haymarket. It opened on 17 January 1988, in Australia’s bicentenary year, as a gift marking the friendship between Sydney and its sister city Guangzhou, and it is laid out in the southern Chinese manner: a lake at the centre crossed by bridges, pavilions and a teahouse around the water, rockeries of weathered stone, and a pagoda set on a rise above it all. The city towers stand close outside the walls, which is the contrast most people end up photographing.

The garden is open 9.30am to 5pm, until 5.30pm during daylight saving, every day except Good Friday and Christmas Day, and adult entry is A$12. Admission tickets can be bought in advance through a tours and activities platform, which saves paying at the gate.

The 1921 clock tower over Central Station’s sandstone terminal

Central Station opened in its present sandstone building on 4 August 1906, designed by the government architect Walter Liberty Vernon, and the clock tower on its north-western corner, 85.6 metres to the tip, followed in 1921. The long-distance trains from interstate and regional New South Wales still come into the terminal platforms beside the Grand Concourse at the top of the building, the same level the station opened with. Below that, the station handles more than 250,000 people a day across 26 platforms, which is why the concourses and the Central Walk passage to the suburban platforms are at their tightest with a suitcase in the morning and evening peaks.

Paddy’s Markets under Market City in Haymarket

Paddy’s Markets has traded in Haymarket since 1834 and now occupies the ground floor of Market City on Hay Street, seven or eight minutes’ walk from Central through Railway Square. The red-brick facade on Hay Street still carries the date 1909 from the city’s old produce market, and inside, hundreds of stalls sell fresh produce, food, clothing and souvenirs, with the Chinatown restaurants of Dixon Street starting at the next corner.

The market floor opens Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 6pm, with the produce traders starting from 8am, and is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Entry is free.

Frank Gehry’s brick “paper bag” on Ultimo Road

The Dr Chau Chak Wing Building stands at 14 to 28 Ultimo Road, a business school for the University of Technology Sydney that opened in February 2015 and was Frank Gehry’s first building in Australia. Its walls are 320,000 custom-made bricks laid so that the whole facade appears to sag, bulge and fold, with square windows set into the waves; Gehry himself allowed that it might look like a brown paper bag.

The building is about ten minutes’ walk west of Central. The Goods Line, a former freight railway turned into a raised walkway, runs past its eastern side from Railway Square toward Darling Harbour, which is the easy way to see it from more than one angle.

One Central Park’s hanging gardens on Broadway

One Central Park is a pair of residential towers at 28 Broadway in Chippendale, across Broadway from the University of Technology Sydney and a few minutes’ walk from Railway Square. Jean Nouvel’s practice designed them with PTW Architects, and the French botanist Patrick Blanc planted the facades: about 85,000 plants of more than 250 species climbing the balconies to over 50 metres. From the 28th floor of the east tower a heliostat hangs out over the park below, a frame of motorised mirrors that bounces sunlight down into the atrium and lights up with LEDs after dark.

The towers were finished in December 2013 and named the best tall building in the world by the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat in 2014. The shopping centre at their base is open to walk through, and Chippendale Green behind it is a public park.

Central’s direct train to Sydney Airport

The T8 Airport & South Line runs from Central to Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport (SYD) in about 13 minutes to the International Airport station under Terminal 1, with trains roughly every 10 minutes from before 5am until after midnight; Domestic Airport, for Terminals 2 and 3, is the stop before. Tap on with a contactless bank card or an Opal card. The airport stations carry a station access fee close to A$19 for an adult on top of the train fare, so a single trip comes to around A$22, and Sydney Airport suggests being at the terminal three hours before an international departure. From Paddy’s Markets or One Central Park, allow ten minutes to walk back to the platforms.

A bag left in the city for the afternoon is one fewer thing to carry through the garden gate, the market aisles and the Goods Line, and then back through Central at five o’clock.