Queen Victoria Building

When Sydney plunged into depression in the 1890s, the city council commissioned a lavish marketplace to employ thousands of out-of-work craftsmen. There was just one problem: it was an open secret that they never wanted a market at all. Legally required to build one, they constructed a monument to circumvention, a ‘marketplace’ with 58 shops, showrooms, a concert hall, and a residential hotel. The Queen Victoria Markets Building opened in 1898 with barely a vegetable in sight.

The basement did technically house a fruit and vegetable market, served by a hydraulic lift built to haul horses and drays down from street level, but even city historians now call this a token gesture. Everything above it, the tailors, the tobacconists, the tea rooms, the 500-seat concert hall, made clear where the council’s real ambitions lay. The building survived a 1959 demolition threat, decades of neglect, and eventually landed in the hands of a Malaysian developer who spent the 1980s turning it into exactly what the council had wanted all along: a shopping centre, just ninety years later than planned.