A new city centre near Sydney’s second airport will be named after engineer John Bradfield.

“Bradfield was a renowned engineer who designed and oversaw the construction of both the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Sydney’s original railway network,” NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian said.

“The name Bradfield is synonymous with delivering game-changing infrastructure and it sets the right tone for the area.”

The government intends Bradfield to become an advanced manufacturing facility and airport city, adjacent to Sydney’s second airport at Bringelly. The state says it will grow into a third city, alongside the other centres of Sydney and Parramatta.

“This area will be transformed into a thriving city centre, home to advanced manufacturing, research, science and education, and we want Bradfield to be as iconic as the existing major city centres of Sydney and Parramatta,” the Premier said. 

The NSW Government has made deals with 18 foundation partners to build facilities in the area, including Suez, Siemens, Hitachi, Sydney Water and Northrup Grumman, and is formalising relationships with other private partners, including FedEx, Romar Engineering and Quickstep.

While the Government says the new airport city will bring an economic boost in the form of thousands of jobs, its decision to build a rail line to the airport is expected to be costly.

Analysis by Infrastructure Australia has found that the business case for the new rail line was based on several flawed assumptions. The expert review said forecasts for the number of people who will move to live near the airport were much too high. 

The Federal Government will be keen to see value extracted from the area, after it paid ten times more than the valuer’s price for a piece of land in the area, and then attempted to “cover it up”.