The station at 627 Canton Road was built in 1922, after an earlier station at the junction of Public Square Street and Shanghai Street was relocated to its current site at the corner of Canton Road and Public Square Street. The main entrance is marked by a semi-circular portico set into an indented corner — a design choice that serves both aesthetic and practical purposes, but one also associated with feng shui in Hong Kong's built environment. Such angled corners were frequently used on commercial and institutional buildings across the city to ease the flow of energy around the structure. After World War II, the station was expanded: a 1957 extension to the west added barracks space and accommodation for officers, enlarging the compound to meet the needs of a Kowloon that was growing faster than anyone had planned.

The locked side gate is the feature visitors notice once they hear about it. The gate itself is not remarkable. What is remarkable is the institutional decision to keep it sealed — a formal acknowledgment, embedded in daily operational practice, that something about the gate's history made its continued use inadvisable. The shrine in the compound's corner addresses a different concern: the Gascoigne Road Flyover, which passes near the station, is considered by some to generate disruptive feng shui for the buildings in its shadow. The shrine is the station's hedge against that disruption. Neither the gate nor the shrine is a tourist attraction in any obvious sense. They are simply parts of how the station managed to function in a city where practical engineering and traditional belief have always occupied the same space.

Despite its relatively modest profile as a neighborhood police station, Yau Ma Tei Police Station appeared in two significant productions. The 2001 Hollywood film Rush Hour 2, starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, used the station for one of its Hong Kong scenes — though the sequence's explosive finale required a purpose-built studio set, since real detonations inside a functioning police compound were not on offer. In 2007, the TVB programme On the First Beat used the station repeatedly, filming in the canteen, the locker rooms, and other interior spaces. The productions capture something of the building's character: a working institutional space with enough age and texture to read as authentic.

After 94 years at 627 Canton Road, the station closed on 22 May 2016. On the same day, a new Yau Ma Tei Police Station opened at No. 3 Yau Cheung Road, carrying the name forward while leaving the old compound behind. A reporting centre continued to operate at the historic building for some time after the main station shut. The old station's fate was complicated by heritage debates that had been building for years — growing conservation awareness in Hong Kong following the 2006 demolition of the Star Ferry Pier at Edinburgh Place had sharpened public attention to what was being lost. The 1922 building, Grade II listed, sits within a district already rich with pre-war structures. Its next chapter was still unresolved at the time of closure, caught between preservation requirements and infrastructure pressures from the Central Kowloon Route project nearby.