210 is located on Main Street, Coorparoo, at the southeast corner of Langlands Park, next to the Buranda Bowls Club.

The small, one storey concrete block and brick utility building was designed by the City Architect's Office and was commissioned in 1930.

[1] The history of electricity supply and distribution began in Brisbane in 1882, with the demonstration of eight arc light street lamps, which were powered by J.W.

The first electricity generating and distribution systems to supply private consumers had started operation in Great Britain and the United States in the same year.

Barton and White's Direct Current (DC) dynamo produced 100 volts to power the post office's arc lights.

As the tram routes expanded, it became necessary to build a power station at Light Street, Fortitude Valley (1913), and one at Logan Road, Woolloongabba (1915).

[1] The three power stations that the BCC had inherited were having difficulty coping with supplying both the expanding tramways, and the suburbs of Ithaca and Toowong.

[1] In 1925 the Brisbane City Council was faced with an obsolete electricity network, and decided that it needed to upgrade its own generation capacity and infrastructure.

The BCC encouraged the public to connect to existing supply lines, and promoted electrical appliances at its own showrooms.

[1] The New Farm power station delivered 11 kV AC to the main control substations of the Tramways Department and the ESD, via underground, paper-insulated, lead-covered, double-wire cables.

The adoption of AC thus enabled the electrification of large urban areas, and eliminated the need for multiple local power plants.

The system of BCC substations built in the late 1920s and 1930s demonstrates this shift to AC distribution, which was an important step in the modernisation of Brisbane.

In 1936 the Royal Commission On Electricity reported that, in units generated per head of population, Queensland ranked last in Australia.

[1] In Brisbane, as each local authority's ten-year agreement with CEL expired, that area's public electricity supply was sourced from New Farm, via ESD substations.

The only other towns to use the series system for street lighting, since they had AC generators, were Maryborough, Mackay, Townsville and Cairns.

[1] The substation on Main Avenue, Coorparoo, was seen as the initial step towards controlling the whole of the street lighting system on the south side of the Brisbane River from one source.

Its use of 200-millimetre (7.9 in) concrete blocks was unusual for City Architect's Office designs of the time, and it was the only pre-World War II Brisbane substation to be built of such materials.

This was operated by a time switch, fitted with an Astronomic Dial calibrated to suit seasonal variations in sunrise and sunset.

[1] The modest, freestanding single-storey pavilion is constructed of 200-millimetre (7.9 in) cement blocks, painted white, with recessed infill panels of colonial-bond red brick.

The timber-framed hipped roof is clad in corrugated iron, and is truncated on the street elevation by a curved Flemish-influenced gable.

Insulators protrude from the upper centre of the gable screen, and two conduit holes remain on the north side of the street elevation.

To each side of the roller door there is a metal-framed six-pane obscure wire-glass window, set within a recessed brick panel.

The lettering "Sub-Station 210", embellished with a decorative moulded scroll and a plaque on each side, is applied in a band above the roller door.

Ventilation is provided by terracotta vents at floor level on the north and south elevations, and by meshed gaps between the top of the walls and the eaves, on three sides.

There are the remains of fixtures and machinery mountings on the walls and floor, along with input and output cable connection points.

[1] The timber stairs to the wicket in the roller door, and the garden beds on the west and north sides of the substation are not of cultural heritage significance.

The locations chosen for substations also serve as indicators of the main electricity load centres of Brisbane prior to World War II.

In addition, only three 11,000-volt street lighting substations had been built by 1940, and of the three, only Coorparoo remains in Brisbane City Council (BCC) ownership.

Its open internal volume, venting, and roller door are standard features in buildings designed to contain electrical equipment.