Queen Victoria Building

There is a sealed letter inside this building that nobody alive today will ever read. In nineteen eighty-six, Queen Elizabeth the Second placed a letter inside the QVB, addressed simply to the right person on the right occasion. It is to be opened in two thousand and eighty-five by the Lord Mayor of Sydney. Nobody knows what it says. You are looking at a sixty-year time capsule from a dead monarch.

The building itself has an absurd backstory. The council wanted to build an upmarket shopping palace, but they were legally required to build a public market. So they built a public market that was secretly a shopping palace -- all romanesque arches, stained glass, and copper domes. The loophole made architectural history.

On the first floor, a Chinese-Australian businessman named Mei Quong Tart ran a tearoom in the eighteen-nineties that became quietly revolutionary. He installed the city's first female public toilets, and the tearoom became a regular meeting place for Sydney's suffragette movement. Women's rights were partially organised from a tea shop inside a building named after a queen.

The basement once had a hydraulic lift powerful enough to lower horses and drays from street level down to the fruit and vegetable markets. And as late as nineteen sixty-nine -- nineteen sixty-nine -- a mayoral candidate was still campaigning on a promise to demolish this building, calling it a firetrap and an eyesore. The eighty-six-million-dollar restoration did not happen until the mid-eighties. You are standing in a building that very nearly became a car park.

Look up at the central dome and the stained glass. Then remember someone looked at all of this and said knock it down.