The company pioneered the incorporation of entertainment and dining precincts into shopping centres.

The Westfield Group had origins in the western suburbs of Sydney. The first development was named “Westfield Place”, and opened in July 1959 in Blacktown, Sydney. The name Westfield is derived from “West” related to the West-Sydney location, and “field” due to having located on subdivided farmland. The centre was opened by John Saunders and Frank Lowy. The company was floated on the Australian Stock Exchange in 1960 and built another five centres in New South Wales before expanding into Victoria and Queensland in 1966-67. The expansion into the US was quite slow. It began with the purchase of the Trumbull Shopping Centre in Connecticut in 1977, and was followed by three centres in California, Michigan and Connecticut in 1980 and three centres in California, New Jersey and Long Island, New York in 1986. In 1994 Westfield joined together with General Growth and Whitehall Real Estate to purchase 19 centres for US$1 billion. Westfield seems to form clusters of centres around particular cities or within a small number of states. They built considerable holdings on the east coast and in California before expanding in the Mid-West. By 2005, the company still only owned centres in 15 US states.

In the 1990s, Westfield began a major expansion across the Tasman to New Zealand, where they mostly bought existing shopping centres of the Fletchers Company, progressively rebranding them. Only in 2007, with Westfield Albany, has the company opened a fully new centre in the country.