Wellington Barracks did not begin as barracks. During the First Opium War, British forces occupied Hong Kong in 1841, and within months the new administration had erected a Naval and Military Hospital in a matshed — a temporary structure of bamboo and matting — on the site between Government Hill and Wan Chai. The hospital lasted approximately six months. A typhoon struck and obliterated it.

The site was rebuilt, and by 1842, maps showed a 'Battery of 5 Guns' on the ground that would eventually become the barracks. The battery was small, improvised, suited to a colony still finding its shape. By 1854, maps identified it specifically as 'Wellington Battery,' named after Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, the soldier who defeated Napoleon and became one of the most celebrated military figures in the British Empire. The name stuck even as the battery faded from maps after 1900 and the site evolved into a full barracks complex.

For most of its history, Wellington Barracks occupied a waterfront position — the seawall ran along its northern edge, and Victoria Harbour was immediately beyond. Land reclamation has since pushed the shore so far outward that the original position now sits deep inland, but in the barracks' working years, soldiers could watch ships passing in the harbour from their posts.

The barracks was connected to Victoria Barracks, a larger military complex nearby, by a cable system running across Queensway — used to transport ammunition between the two sites without moving it through public streets. In 1890, a clock tower was added to the main building. Electricity came to Wellington Barracks in 1910, relatively early for colonial infrastructure. By that point, the 'Golden Clock' name had already taken root among local residents, shaping the Chinese identity of the whole Admiralty area.

On 7 September 1945, just days after Japan's formal surrender ended World War II, the Royal Navy re-established their base at Wellington Barracks — which the British Army vacated to make way. The occupation years had been brutal for Hong Kong; the handover of the barracks back to British forces was one of many administrative acts that marked the colony's return to prewar arrangements. The liberation had been commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt, who would be promoted to Vice Admiral the following year.

But the city was not returning to prewar arrangements. Hong Kong was growing rapidly, and the barracks, positioned between Central and Wan Chai, had become an obstacle: a military enclave that divided two districts rather than connecting them. Through the 1970s, the British Army's presence was wound down and the land returned to the Hong Kong government. Wellington Barracks closed by the end of that decade.

Both Wellington and Victoria Barracks were demolished in the mid-1980s. Where Victoria Barracks had stood, a fraction of the land became Pacific Place, one of Hong Kong's major commercial complexes. The site of Wellington Barracks became Harcourt Garden — a public park named for Rear Admiral Sir Cecil Harcourt, who commanded the British force that retook Hong Kong in 1945.

The park is modest by comparison to the institution it replaced: a few trees and benches between the glass towers of Admiralty, with the elevated road network overhead. Excavation work carried out in Harcourt Garden in 2012 by the Antiquities and Monuments Office found traces of the barracks' foundations beneath the surface. The golden clock is gone. The MTR trains still stop at Gam Zung — the Golden Clock — every few minutes, carrying commuters who may not know what the name means or why.