Phase one of community engagement took place over a four-week period from 5 February to 5 March 2025. Thank you to everyone who shared their ideas.

We asked the community to share their vision for transforming the site and invited expressions of interest to join the project’s Advisory Committee.

In total we received 369 pieces of feedback, comprised of:

• 📝309 survey submissions
• 📌Five gather tool, public forum contributions
• 📩Two email submissions
• 🧒One children’s drawing
• 💭Three blackboard activity responses
• 🗳️ 49 dotmocracy votes

Select the tabs below for a summary of what we heard in the phase one engagement — or read the full Engagement Summary Report.

We asked our community to tell us the three most important features we should consider for the open space design. The top three features were:

We asked a number of open-response questions to understand what would make our community excited to visit the future open space — and what features would make it feel accessible, comfortable and safe for all users.

The top themes across the open-response questions are represented in the word cloud below, with larger words appearing more frequently.

Below you can browse through responses we received through the online forum hosted on our Have Your Say page during engagement.

Built in 1885, the Victorian Italianate building is of local heritage significance.

We’re retaining the building — and asked for ideas for a new building use that will benefit the community and complement the future open space.

We heard 13 ideas from the survey comments, of which 30 per cent suggested that the building could be a multi-use facility — meaning it could accommodate more than one of the uses suggested.

The top three building use ideas were: