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The market
A market and a police court stood on the site until 1891
The site has been under the control of the City of Sydney council since 1842. It was earlier the location of municipal markets, and under Governor Macquarie it was imagined by the architect Francis Greenway as a grand civic square. A produce market and the Central Police Court stood on it until those uses ceased in 1891 and the council bought the land.
George McRae
The architect drew four designs and the council chose one
The building was designed by George McRae, a Scottish architect who had emigrated to Sydney in 1884. He produced four designs in different styles, Gothic, Renaissance, Queen Anne and Romanesque, and the council chose the Victorian Romanesque. The foundation stone, a five-tonne block of granite, was laid in December 1893 by the Mayor, Sir William Manning.
The name
It was named for the Queen without asking her
In 1897 the council resolved to dedicate the new market buildings to Queen Victoria, in commemoration of her Diamond Jubilee. It decided not to ask for the Queen's assent, in part because that would have made it necessary to put the Royal Coat of Arms on the building. The name was amended in 1918, and in 1987 the council gave it the name Queen Victoria Building.
1898
It opened on 21 July 1898 with a ball for a thousand guests
The building was constructed between 1893 and 1898 and officially opened on 21 July 1898. In the evening a grand ball for more than a thousand guests was held in the adjacent Town Hall. The building is 30 metres wide and 190 metres long. Its central dome has an interior glass dome and a copper-sheathed exterior.
In this plan
It is one of the stops on this plan.
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The words are a retelling of the Wikipedia article Queen Victoria Building, and are shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. They are checked against those articles, and a fact that is not in them is left out.