A cultural tour of Sydney with Hong Kong menswear purveyor Alex Daye

There is no more modern a tourist attraction than the scruffy art gallery district hewn from the rough stone of the post-industrial neighbourhood. Every city worth its salt has one at various stages of gentrification. Some, like New York, have a few, although most have become luxury shopping destinations.

Hong Kong, on the other hand, is a nascent "art hub". The old factories of Chai Wan and Wong Chuk Hang are where the art people hang their hats, but are so un-gentrified that you'd be hard pressed to find a place to eat dinner. You can also forget about shopping.

Then there's Sydney: bright blue skies, great food, charming old buildings and a funky corridor of art galleries, independent shops, cafes and pubs right at that sweet spot of development - before landlords cotton on that something interesting is happening and raise the rents to stratospheric heights. Catch it while you can.

The (30 Balfour St, Chippendale, tel: +61 2 8399 2867), South African Judith Neilson's private collection of 21st century Chinese art, housed in a former Rolls-Royce service depot, is the jewel in the crown of the new Chippendale, the tiny inner-city district which was, in the 19th century, the city's most notorious slum. Until as recently as a decade ago, it was still the site of the 168-year-old Carlton & United Brewery. Today, the small warren of leafy side streets radiating off its main artery, Abercrombie Street, lined with the Victorian terrace houses built for its bygone working class and the brick warehouse spaces they toiled in, is a fairy tale of urban renewal, and, on a clear day, an exceedingly pleasant area to wander about in.

Neilson's collection is too large to fit in the gallery at any one time, and so is shown in circulation in new thematic shows every six months. At the moment, that theme is "State of Play", and, largely because it's neither a commercial enterprise nor an academic one, the curation is more whimsical than what one is accustomed to in Hong Kong. Guan Xiao's , for example, is an hilarious yet somehow profound video piece in which the artist grapples - through the medium of karaoke - with Michelangelo's statue of David and all the souvenir bric-a-brac it has spawned.

Around the corner on Little Queen Street, Nikki Ginsburg, having grown up in London, the birthplace of the post-industrial, was one of the first in Sydney to see the potential of Chippendale, turning a stunning Gothic Revival City Mission into (3 Little Queen St, Chippendale, tel: +61 2 9318 2992). Not content with the life of a mere gallerist, she is also the founder of the Chippendale Creative Precinct, hosts the annual Beams Art Festival, publishes the Gallery Guide to Chippendale and Surrounds, conducts free walking tours of the district on the first Saturday of every month, and sponsors an art prize, open to the public and exhibited across three galleries.