The old town centre of KKB has a row of early 20th-century shophouses in the Chinese colonial style typical of Malaysian market towns — two-storey buildings with covered walkways, decorative facades, and ground-floor businesses that have sometimes been in the same families for generations. There are coffee shops, hardware stores, and a morning market that's liveliest before 9am.
The town was built after the original Kuala Kubu was destroyed by the catastrophic Selangor dam failure of 1883, which killed thousands of people. The replacement town was laid out on higher ground with a regular grid of streets. A Buddhist temple and a mosque that survived the original flood still stand at the old town site (now called Ampang Pecah), a few kilometres from the current town centre.