Before the lions, before the king, there was a marketplace. Albert Street once ran west from the Botanic Gardens to the original city markets, and the open ground here was simply Market Square. That changed in 1930, when Brisbane City Hall rose at its edge, a sandstone giant with a clock tower that was, for a time, the tallest structure in the city. The council widened the street, set the hall back behind a generous apron of open space, and named it Albert Square after Prince Albert, the husband of Queen Victoria. It was a place built for ceremony from the start, a stage with the grandest backdrop Brisbane could muster.

In 1912, before it had even been formally named, this ground saw one of the most violent days in Brisbane's history. More than fifteen thousand trade unionists gathered here during the general strike, having been refused a permit to march. On the orders of Police Commissioner Cahill, mounted officers charged the crowd and struck at peaceful demonstrators. The day became known as Black Friday, Australia's first general strike turned bloody on the streets of the capital. The square that would later host kings and popes had first earned its place in the city's memory as a site of confrontation between workers and the state, and that history sits quietly beneath the paving.

King George V died in 1936, and Brisbane responded the way cities did then. The square was widened to absorb what had been Albert Street and renamed in the king's honour. Two years later, in 1938, the citizens unveiled their tribute: a memorial to George V, flanked by those bronze lions on heavy sandstone plinths. For decades, traffic still rolled through the square, including a trolley-bus route, until 1969, when the road was finally closed and an underground car park hollowed out beneath. The statues were shifted to where they stand today, the lions lowered closer to the people who would one day climb on them.

The square has a gift for gathering crowds around a single figure. Eleanor Roosevelt stood here in 1943, during the Second World War, when Brisbane was a hub for Allied forces in the Pacific. Queen Elizabeth II appeared during her 1954 royal tour. Pope John Paul II addressed the public here in 1986. In a corner the city calls Speakers' Corner, bronze statues honour three Queenslanders: the writer Steele Rudd, the suffragist and union organiser Emma Miller, and Sir Charles Lilley, a former premier and chief justice. Sculptures salvaged from the 1988 World Expo were folded into the design as well, layering the square with the city's own keepsakes.

The square reopened in October 2009 after sixteen months of redevelopment, its design chosen in a national competition. The new look stripped away grass and shade in favour of broad, pale paving, and Brisbane, a subtropical city, noticed immediately. Critics called it too hot to handle, blistering with reflected glare and offering almost nowhere to escape the sun. During the millennium drought, which gripped southeast Australia for much of the 2000s, the central fountain had already been drained and replaced with a water-wise garden of hardy plants. The criticism stuck, a reminder that a civic space must serve the climate it sits in, not just the architect's drawings.