A day of downtown tourism on New Year’s Day, and it opened with a real win: the Sydney Metro. Gadigal station is something else — the sheer volume of the space, the corridors immaculate, and even the toilets held to a five-star standard. Transport for London, with respect, has some catching up to do.
From there to Sydney Town Hall, where we produced some faultless cha siu bau and settled into the square among the flowers, the pigeons and a happy crush of tourists — when, out of nowhere, the lion dancers arrived, all colour and commitment. We finished at Darling Harbour and took a ferry on an unhurried lap of the harbour round to Circular Quay, gathering photographs as we went. A hot day, but Sydney had decided to look beautiful, and thoroughly meant it.
The station’s polish is brand new. Gadigal opened in 2024 as part of Sydney’s driverless Metro, and it was deliberately named to honour the Gadigal, the traditional custodians of central Sydney — a rare instance of a First Nations name given to a piece of gleaming new infrastructure rather than a monument. It has since been listed among the most beautiful metro stations in the world, so your instinct about it was sound.
Further reading: Why the station is named Gadigal