IAN’S STORY

 

As a resident of Hong Kong since 1979 and a trained (though not practising) architect to boot, I had heard the stories of this remarkable community that operated outside the usual legal and regulatory norms, and had even taken a trip over to the back streets of Kowloon City to see it once.

This must have been in 1981 or so and the Walled City at that time was still surrounded to the south and west by the much larger – in area if not in height – Sai Tau Tsuen squatter settlement, which largely hid the Walled City from view, at least from street level. You could get a closer view from Tung Tsing Road and Tung Tau Tsuen Road, to the east and north respectively, but in many ways these elevations resembled the many tenement buildings that could be found all over Hong Kong at that time, covered with projecting signs at the lower levels and festooned with caged balconies above.

It was only on entering the maze of alleys that I realised that this was significantly different from anything I might have come across before. And like many Hong Kong residents, I was already well versed in the stories of murder and mayhem that surrounded the City at that time. Indeed, I remember well many of my local Chinese friends warning me not to enter; I was bound to be mugged or worse. I am usually sceptical of such claims, but it is difficult to work out now whether the cold shoulder I felt emanating from everyone I came across in the alleys was real, or just my imagination fearing the stories might be true.

In hindsight, it is more likely that the appearance of a ‘gweilo’ in the City at that time probably identified me as a plains-clothes policeman or, more likely, a civil servant of some kind and therefore immediately to be treated with suspicion. Either way, I did not stay long and neither did I think of returning any time soon. I was a keen photographer, but by then, after more than two years in Hong Kong, I already had an ample supply of pictures of older tenement buildings, dark alleys and public housing estates.

I was also busy with my ‘new’ life on Hong Kong Island, working with Foster Associates on the design of the new Hongkong Bank headquarters for a couple of years and then going freelance as an architectural photographer, graphic designer and eventually as a publisher of books on architecture and design.

 

 

The first book of mine to go on general sale was published in 1986 and was a photographic record of the design and construction of the Hongkong Bank. And much to my delight, it was well received. Better still, Norman Foster was suitably impressed and asked me to become involved with the design and publication of what became the first four-volume series of monographs on his practice’s work. It turned out, Norman had already been in discussion with the eminent designer Otl Aicher, a leading figure in the development of graphic design in post-war Europe, about producing a new form of architectural book and somehow I ended up becoming the series’ editor and production assistant, gathering all the available visual material (of which there were immense amounts), commissioning writers and then working up Otl’s detailed concept layouts into their final published form.

As it happened, the initial discussions about this new phase of my ‘career’ got under way in London at the beginning of New Year 1987, followed by a three-day brain-storming session with Otl Aicher at his beautiful home and office near the town of Rotis in southern Germany, so I was not in Hong Kong when the announcement was made that the Walled City was finally to be cleared and demolished. And to be honest, I cannot remember exactly when I heard about it when I returned to Hong Kong towards the end of January 1987.

With the Foster volumes just starting to get under way (which incidentally would mean spending several months of the following three years working in Europe), becoming involved in another major book project was the farthest thing from my mind, but for reasons I can’t remember now it did cross my mind that maybe I should go out and photograph the Walled City ‘properly’ before it disappeared – as much for my own amusement as anything else, though maybe there would be a magazine story in it.

It is impossible to remember now when I might have taken the first images, but judging by the clarity of the light and the bluest of blue skies, it was probably in the autumn of 1987. It may have only been six years on from my first visit, but the change was dramatic. The Sai Tau Tsuen squatter settlement was now long gone and for the first time one could get an overall view of the Walled City in all its magnificence – an experience magnified perhaps from an architectural perspective in that the long southern facade was still made up of the absurdly narrow buildings that harked back to the City’s squatter beginnings in the immediate post-war years.

Almost from the beginning I was captivated and whenever time allowed and the weather was enticing, my trips out to the City became more regular, maybe just once or twice a month but enough to also involve increasing explorations of the City’s inner workings, its alleys and stairways. Slowly the idea that this extraordinary place should be properly recorded, dare I say it, in a book began to surface, but how that came about is another story.