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My 20 years in Kennedy Town, a Hong Kong dump turned destination

From the waves that used to strike the Praya to the barbers and their 100-year-old chairs, Fionnuala McHugh reflects on the vivid life and changing face of a gentrifying neighbourhood and the symbolism of the fight to save its 'temporary' garden

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Residents pin up old photos of the area in Cadogan Street Temporary Garden as part of their battle to retain the green space. Photos: Fionnuala McHugh; SCMP

The first time I visited Kennedy Town, at the northwestern end of Hong Kong Island, the sea still ran up to the Praya and there were stone-pillared arcades in Belcher's Street. That was in 1993. Someone had told me about (relatively) cheap flats at the far end of the neighbourhood, where the trams turn to begin their journey back along the island, in two blocks owned by the Tung Wah Group of Hospitals. The address was Victoria Road, and as I'd just left a tiny flat in Victoria Road, London, for the single year I intended to be in Hong Kong, the symmetry felt appropriate.

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But it turned out that Tung Wah had a strict two-year, no-break-lease policy; so I hopped round the city until 1996, when a friend mentioned that Tung Wah had introduced the more usual one-year (plus two months) break clause. That's why I remember the date I moved in: May 15, 1996. In 14 months, it would be July 15, 1997, a fortnight after the handover of the British territory back to China, and I'd certainly be on my way.

A couple of days before the move, I went to the flat with a tape measure and heard about a gun battle that morning in the streets below. Hong Kong's most-wanted criminal, Yip Kai-foon, also known as Goosehead, notorious for spraying bullets from an AK-47 during robberies, had been captured by a couple of policemen who'd seen him coming ashore and initially assumed he was an illegal immigrant. (He was paralysed in the shoot-out, and is currently in Stanley prison, serving a 41-year sentence.) I can remember looking down at the harbourfront and wondering if a move to this wild west was such a good idea.
If they have the authority to demolish this park, why don’t we have the authority to use this park?
Hui Chi-fung, district councillor

 

 

 

"Is it safe where you are, Fionnuala?" my father had asked anxiously on the phone from Omagh, in Northern Ireland. The question had nothing to do with Yip and everything to do with family history.

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