Oil Street's original geography no longer exists. The street once ended directly at the waterfront, giving the buildings along it a harbour orientation that shaped their purpose. The Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club built its headquarters and clubhouse here in 1908, the water access being the entire point. Over subsequent decades, land reclamation pushed the shoreline outward, and the street's northern end now terminates at reclaimed ground rather than open water.

The street runs northwest to southeast. From King's Road at its eastern anchor, it crosses Electric Road, intersects with Wang On Road and King Wah Road, then passes beneath the elevated Island Eastern Corridor before reaching the current shoreline near Victoria Harbour. The orientation and scale have barely changed even as everything around it has been rebuilt multiple times.

In 1998, when the Government Supplies Department relocated from its depot on Oil Street, the government did something quietly significant: it offered the vacant building to local artists and organisations on short-term tenancies. What formed was the Oil Street Artist Village — Hong Kong's first locally constituted art community. For two years, studios occupied former storage spaces, and the street developed an identity it had never previously claimed.

The village ended when the building was vacated in 2000. Some tenants moved to the Cattle Depot Artist Village in To Kwa Wan. But the episode planted a memory that would eventually shape what replaced it. When the government later developed the former Yacht Club building at No. 12 as Oi! art space in 2013, the precedent set by those two improvised years was already part of the street's identity.

Oil Street's ghost stories are well-known to North Point residents, and they cluster around a former mortuary on the street that ceased operations in 1998. The building's history — a place for the dead standing a short walk from a place for art — gives the street an atmospheric depth that purely commercial corridors lack.

The street's relatively flat profile and modest width make it easy to overlook. Yet the layering of uses over more than a century — kerosene stores, yacht club, government depot, artist village, art space — has made it a compressed record of how Hong Kong has reorganised its waterfront and its relationship to creative life.

A major development project is planned for Inland Lot No. 8920, a site of approximately 7,887 square metres that has sat vacant since the Government Supplies Department departed in the late 1990s. Ocean Century Investment Limited won a 50-year land grant from the Lands Department in a competitive tender, beating five other companies. The approved proposal envisions hotels, residential units of no more than 400 dwellings, and public open space including a Sculpture Plaza intended to extend the cultural precinct anchored by Oi! to the south.

The hotel component — designed to evoke a sailboat's form, nodding to the Yacht Club history embedded in the block — would cap a transformation that has taken the street from industrial waterfront to cultural corridor over more than a century.