The land Sham Shui Po Park sits on has been barrack, battleground, camp, and refuge in the span of a single century. Before the park, the site was the Sham Shui Po Barracks, a British military installation. When Japanese forces occupied Hong Kong in December 1941, the barracks became a prisoner-of-war camp where British, Canadian, and other Allied troops were held in conditions of deliberate deprivation. Many died of disease, malnutrition, and neglect. Victor Stanley Ebbage, a British prisoner, later wrote an account titled The Hard Way: Surviving Shamshuipo POW Camp 1941–45, published in 2011, that captures what daily survival on this ground demanded. The camp closed when the occupation ended in 1945.

The site did not rest after the war. Following the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the subsequent exodus of Vietnamese refugees, the former barracks complex became the Jubilee Transit Centre, designed to shelter 500 people — primarily army family members. By 1983, more than 3,000 Vietnamese refugees were living there. Caritas Hong Kong took over management, running a nursery, a school, a clinic, a recreation centre, and a dedicated section for unaccompanied minors within the camp's confines. The people who lived there had survived extraordinary journeys; the camp itself was crowded and difficult. The refugee camp eventually gave way to a temporary housing area of 278 units, which was cleared in the late 1990s to make way for the park extension that exists today.

The first phase of Sham Shui Po Park opened on 9 March 1984, officially inaugurated by Urban Councillor Elsie Elliott, a formidable advocate for Hong Kong's working-class communities who had spent decades fighting corruption and pressing for better living conditions in districts exactly like this one. The first phase cost HK$9.8 million. A swimming pool followed in 1985. The park expanded in subsequent phases, absorbing the former temporary housing area and — on the opposite side of Lai Chi Kok Road — a separate site within Lai Kok Estate that was originally managed by the Housing Department before transfer to the Leisure and Cultural Services Department. The two sections remain physically disconnected, split by the road.

Today Sham Shui Po Park is a functional neighbourhood green space: basketball courts, a jogging track, tai chi courts, a gateball court, a swimming pool, and the two memorial plaques near trees planted by veterans' associations. The fountain no longer works. Crows descended in large numbers in the early 2000s, causing concern among residents at a time when H5N1 bird flu was a live anxiety in Hong Kong. The park's layers are invisible to a casual visitor — no interpretive trail connects the POW camp to the refugee centre to the housing area to the green lawn. That compression of histories is not unique to this park; it is, in some ways, characteristic of how Hong Kong holds its past: present, marked if you know to look, otherwise covered over by the ordinary business of daily life.