The wharves were born of the 1930s Depression, and their first purpose was simply to keep people employed. The Forgan-Smith state government built them as relief work, part of the same job-creating push that produced the Story Bridge looming directly overhead. Originally called the Brisbane Central Wharves, they were the last major piece of working wharfage in the central city, the final downstream step in a slow migration of Brisbane's port that had begun back in the 1840s. The Australian coastal shipping firm Howard Smith Co. Ltd leased the site from the mid-1930s into the early 1960s, and it is that company's name, rather than the official one, that stuck to the place for good.

When war reached the Pacific, the wharves suddenly sat in a dangerous spot. A large workforce laboured here, right beside the Story Bridge, exactly the kind of target an enemy might want. So in 1941 and 1942, air-raid shelters were cut into the base of the cliffs. Some were 'pillbox' types, squat concrete boxes; others were built from enormous concrete pipes laid end to end with entrances at either end, an unusual design found almost nowhere else. They survive today as the most intact group of wartime shelters in Brisbane, and the pipe shelters in particular are genuinely rare. More than concrete, they are a record of fear, of how close the war once felt to the people working this stretch of riverbank.

The bones of the old port are still legible along the water. A two-storey reinforced-concrete office building, later home to the Water Police, anchors the western end, its verandah and deep eaves facing the river. Strung out beyond it stand the timber-framed cargo sheds, numbered two through five, clad in corrugated steel, the longest of them with a double-gabled roof and part of it actually built out over the water. Remnant timber piles from still earlier wharves poke up from the river in front of the sheds. The cliffs behind, part overgrown and part bare rock, do double duty: they form the dramatic backdrop to the whole site and physically support the northern footing of the Story Bridge above.

After the shipping company gave up its lease in the early 1960s, the wharves slid into a long dereliction. Most of central Brisbane's old riverside wharves were simply demolished in the redevelopments of the following decades. The Howard Smith Wharves endured, the most intact survivor of the pre-1940 port, but survival is not the same as life, and for years the site sat neglected. Reviving it proved genuinely hard. A 2009 plan for heavy commercial development was rejected by locals who wanted public space, then a revised plan was knocked back by the state over flood risk, fears confirmed when the 2010 to 2011 floods inundated the site. Restoring the boardwalks alone cost millions before any new vision could even be announced.

The turnaround finally came. Fresh proposals were sought in 2013, a developer chosen in 2014, a design approved in 2015, and at last, in late 2018, the reborn precinct opened to the city. The old industrial shell now holds restaurants, bars and a craft brewery, an events space and the Fantauzzo hotel, with most of the land kept as public open space along the water. A ferry terminal opened in 2020, linking the wharves into the river-transport network that has always defined Brisbane life. The shelters in the cliffs, the weathered timber wharves, the sheds, all remain, woven into the new precinct. A place built to get Brisbane through its hardest years has become one of the happiest spots on its river.