Tom Uren meandered by the harbour most mornings, his back straight and his tattered Akubra atop his head. He liked catching the eye of people he passed on his daily walk along the foreshore and lanes that amble across the Balmain peninsula.

There's a gentleness, a softness, to Sydney Harbour, he might say, stopping to chat with his Cavalier King Charles spaniel Peter by his side. "The harbour is more than a jewel – it is Sydney's heart."

The former federal Labor deputy leader, who died in 2015, spent much of his long life fighting to heal that heart from "the scars inflicted by insensitive developers". He will be commemorated on Saturday - on what would have been his 95th birthday - with the opening of the Tom Uren Trail, which tracks the foreshore and surrounding streets of East Balmain.

The rambling route runs past Uren's recycled timber home, where he liked to sit at the kitchen table in his hat and singlet, the rising sun on his back. The view from the balcony looks across the harbour to Ballast Point Park, which he helped to save from residential development.

Each morning until his health failed, he walked about the inner-western suburb and among the shops of Darling Street in a T-shirt, sneakers, his hat and shorts. "He still had good legs," his widow, Christine Logan, says.

Uren, a former heavyweight boxer, liked to keep fit and starting conversations with passersby. "He loved walking and he loved engaging with people," Logan says. "I came home one day and there was a young man painting a picture of Balls Head on the balcony, someone he had picked up and invited home to paint."

He was born in Balmain in 1921 and returned there in 1988 - near the end of his 32 years as an MP in western Sydney. In 1990, he retired from parliament but not politics, continuing to campaign for public access to Sydney Harbour.

He would have been outraged by James Packer's planned casino across the water at Barangaroo, Logan says. "Tom's vision was that the harbour should be the people's harbour. He believed that everybody in Sydney should be able to enjoy its beauty. A casino is for the elite and he would have hated the ugliness of that building."

She hopes the walking trail will be gradually expanded by reclaiming private parts of the waterside for public use. "This is an ongoing fight – Tom always loved a good fight – to improve harbour foreshore access for everyone."

Uren never stopped fighting, she says. After moving to a nursing home in the eastern suburbs in 2014, he practised boxing exercises in his chair, coaching visitors to throw a right hook. He often talked of returning home to his beloved Balmain.

Logan, a former opera singer, says the 16 months since his death, at the age of 93, have been difficult. "He got cancer so I knew he was dying, I was prepared for that," she says. "But what I wasn't prepared for is him not being here."

Random memories of Uren stick in her mind: putting on his hat straight after showering to set his hair in place; waiting for her by the Sydney Opera House stage door after Turandot; the big hugs he gave her daughter Ruby, whom he helped to raise as his own.

Logan says he would have loved the walking trail. "Tom liked to be remembered," she says.