Owing to their unique combination of low nonlinearity, low latency, air guidance, and bend-insensitivity, hollow core photonic bandgap fibres (HC-PBGFs) have been proposed for a range of applications. However, the availability of high performance, i.e. large core, long length, broad bandwidth, and low loss HC-PBGFs, which would strongly benefit some of these applications (e.g. telecom/datacom) is limited so far. In this paper, we will review our recent advances in achieving high performance HC-PBGFs, looking in particular to fibre development and fabrication. We will first discuss the challenges during the preform preparation and fibre drawing and how we addressed them. We then cover the development of fibres optimized for a few key application areas: high power laser beam delivery at 1 µm, low latency and high capacity data-communication in both the traditional 1.55 µm spectral region and in the 2 µm spectral region.