Customs House

Walk into the ground floor of this building and look down. Beneath a glass floor panel is a one-tonne scale model of the Sydney city centre that most people at Circular Quay walk straight past without knowing it exists. The model covers ten square kilometres at one-to-five-hundred scale, contains over one thousand individually handcrafted buildings, and measures four-point-two by nine-point-five metres. At night, hundreds of fibre-optic lights come alive inside the tiny buildings, and you are basically a giant looking down at a miniature glowing city.

The model has been handcrafted and continuously updated for over twenty years. Every time a significant building goes up or comes down in the CBD, someone has to make a tiny replica and swap it in. It is an obsessive, painstaking, slightly mad ongoing project, and it is free to visit.

The building itself is standing on some of the most historically significant ground in Australia. This is the site where the First Fleet landed in seventeen-eighty-eight. The original customs house was constructed in eighteen forty-four and eighteen forty-five as the colony's customs checkpoint -- every piece of cargo entering or leaving Sydney passed through here. The building you see now is a later renovation with classical columns and ornate sandstone, but the function was the same for over a century: this was the financial gateway to the colony.

If you have only got a few minutes at Circular Quay and you want to see something genuinely surprising, skip the souvenir shops. Come in here. Stand on the glass. Look down at the city you are standing in, rebuilt in miniature at your feet. Then look up at the vaulted ceiling and remember you are in a building that has been processing arrivals since the eighteen-forties -- including you, right now.