Regular passenger service between Kowloon and Canton (today's Guangzhou) began on 1 October 1910, though it started from a temporary timber structure near the old Salisbury Road Post Office. The permanent station came later: architect Arthur Benison Hubback — the same man who designed Kuala Lumpur's railway station — drew up plans for a proper terminus, and construction began on 1 March 1914 on land reclaimed from Victoria Harbour. Two years almost to the day later, on 1 March 1916, the building was complete. Its official opening followed on 28 March 1916. The result was a two-storey, L-shaped terminal in Edwardian Classical Revival style: a steel frame clad in red brick, with white granite columns, architraves, and pediments climbing the facade. At its corner stood the clock tower that would one day outlast the rest.

By 1970, the station was sixty years old and the colonial government had its eye on the site for redevelopment. Letters went to the Colonial Secretary — from the Kowloon Residents' Association in 1970, from the Tsim Sha Tsui Neighbourhood and Welfare Association in 1975 and again in 1977. The Heritage Society escalated, petitioning Governor Murray MacLehose directly in July 1977. The Government rejected the petition and dismissed calls for an independent inquiry. Undeterred, the Heritage Society gathered signatures and sent that file of 15,000 names to the Queen in February 1978, hoping royal intervention might succeed where official channels had failed. It did not. The station was demolished, replaced eventually by the Hong Kong Cultural Centre, which opened in 1989 on the same reclaimed ground. The KCR terminus relocated north to Hung Hom in 1975.

Demolition did not erase everything. Six stone pillars from the station building were salvaged and relocated to the Urban Council Centenary Garden in Tsim Sha Tsui East, where they still stand as architectural orphans. The clock tower itself was left in place — a lone monument on the waterfront promenade, declared a protected monument by the Hong Kong government. For decades, its bell sat in exile at the East Rail depot at Ho Tung Lau, separated from the tower it was built to ring. Then, in September 2010, the bell was brought home. Today it hangs again where it always belonged, above the Tsim Sha Tsui waterfront, measuring time on a site that has otherwise been entirely transformed around it.

The Clock Tower today is one of Hong Kong's most photographed landmarks — a 44-metre-tall red-brick and granite remnant of Edwardian ambition, flanked now by the Cultural Centre and the Museum of Art, with the Star Ferry pier a short walk away. Ferries still cross the harbour; the railway still runs, though from Hung Hom and eventually from the West Kowloon terminus opened in 2018. Tourists photograph the tower against the harbor light. Few know that Hongkongers once petitioned a queen to save what the tower belonged to, or that 15,000 of them cared enough to sign their names to the cause. The tower stands as a monument to both the station that was lost and the people who tried, and failed, to keep it.