The Servicemen's Guides Association began as a purely voluntary street-level presence. The government donated land for an initial structure — a modest 28-foot by 20-foot building — and the pier's formal life began. George Fenwick, whose name the location already carried from his shipyard established in 1887, lent the whole endeavour an unconscious historical continuity. By 1953 the SGA had a home, and by 1962, when Typhoon Wanda made a direct hit on 1 September and caused extensive damage, it had already become embedded enough in the city's rhythms that the organisation simply moved operations to the Sailor's Home basement and kept going. Typhoon Ruby struck two years later, in September 1964. The pier was rebuilt both times. It reopened on 5 June 1965.

In 1967, the government decided to reclaim the Wan Chai seafront to build a new express highway. The SGA was asked to relocate. Rather than ending the enterprise, the reclamation gave it a larger footprint: the government granted approximately 30,000 square feet on the newly reclaimed land, and the first and second phases of the new Fenwick Pier building opened in 1970. The new facility was considerably more ambitious than anything that had existed before — a restaurant, a money exchange, a film processing concession, a gift shop, lounges equipped with typewriters and telephones and billiard tables, chaplains' offices, and an information booth. The extension completed in 1974 added further space for servicemen to relax. In 1994, the four-storey Fleet Arcade opened, providing a supermarket, barber shop, tailor shop, and souvenir outlets.

At its operational peak, Fenwick Pier served sailors from 14 countries in a given decade, with between two and 28 naval vessels arriving annually and between 1,280 and 35,400 sailors passing through each year. The SGA's services were not merely commercial: visiting sailors received free local SIM cards, transportation shuttles, guided information in their own languages, and the assurance that someone ashore understood both their needs and Hong Kong's geography. The SGA operated formally as a private club under the Club Ordinance — membership was free, requiring only a name, an email address, and a signature — which kept the facilities accessible while maintaining the legal structure necessary to operate them.

The harbour that gave Fenwick Pier its purpose gradually withdrew. By 2016, reclamation had left the pier landlocked entirely — surrounded by roads rather than water, its name increasingly ironic. In January 2020, the Hong Kong government notified the SGA that the lease would end and that the site must be vacated by the close of 2021. Fenwick Pier closed permanently on 11 February 2022. The government's plan is to relocate the Kong Wan Fire Station in Wan Chai to the site, freeing the current fire station land for an extension of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre. It is a pragmatic end for a place that was never pragmatic in origin — that desk on the sidewalk in 1953 had been about hospitality, which is rarely the most efficient use of reclaimed land.