Public space? They must be having a Lend of us

Lend Lease’s response to public submissions on Barangaroo is an attempt to pull the wool further over the public’s eyes (‘‘Lend Lease defends hotel in the harbour’’, November 23).

In particular, its comment that the 40-storey hotel will reflect the site’s ‘‘industrial heritage’’ has little regard to historical reality.

The industrial heritage of Barangaroo is as a gas works and then as a dock. Most people would struggle to have an idea of the connection between those and $300 a night with a chocolate on the pillow.

It is simply untrue that the development represents a ‘‘quasi-public space’’. So the hotel management will be happy with the great unwashed wandering around its corridors and function rooms, and diving into the swimming pool? I presume not: this hotel is an entirely private space.

Lend Lease would also like us to believe that its hotel proposal is not unprecedented, because ‘‘Two of Sydney’s reclaimed piers contain hotels – at Pier One in Walsh Bay and the finger wharf at Woolloomooloo Bay’’. There is a world of difference in that the piers held wharves above, built expressly as dock facilities. You can’t build a pier inland, after all. The new building of a hotel in the harbour is not analogous; a hotel can be built inland, thus making Lend Lease’s proposal unprecedented.

A most opaque planning procedure is now shrouded in historical myth.

Tom Macdonald  Birchgrove