Stuart Wolfendale

I am more of a monument than Queen’s Pier. I am older and much more interestingly shaped. I don’t know how many times I have been docked at but I have never been fished off. I haven’t been graded since university and then it was a 2. I don’t want to be relocated either but I have an edge over the Pier. If I see a 6-lane motorway being built at speed towards me, I can get up and trott off.

The whole fractious grading exercise as a not very clever device to force Roly Poly Ho at Home Affairs to memorialize the Pier, is far too late and in the wrong direction. We should have been ranting against motorways through the harbour and more gross shopping developments devoted to branded tat for women from the very beginning. The Pier itself is valueless- even for its sentiment.

How many Hong Kong folk now or ever shed a tear for the place where ostrich plumed governors first set foot? That didn’t happen very often either-on average once every thirteen years since 1945. Solitary men fished off it. Local television might miss it for the  miles of drama footage, involving love affairs in crisis and attempted suicides which were shot there. Day trippers boarded launches and guffawing gweilos, were picked up by junks from there  on Sunday mornings- although towards the end of the Pier’s life, boat captain’s pleaded for that to be done elsewhere because the harbour’s choppy waters made boarding deeply dodgy.My sole fondness for the Pier was that, when you disembarked pissed off a pleasure junk on a Sunday evening, the steps were wide and shallow and there was tons of space at the top leaving plenty of room for rolling error.If they’d wanted to preserve a pier they should have kept the one before this one, a bulky, stuccoed, pseudo classical pavilion with heavy Raj overtones. Now there was a monstrosity worth fighting for but pulled down for reclamation and City Hall. Talking of City Hall, you have before you a monstrosity that has been completely overlooked for destruction. I would be quite happy for the government to give that motorway an elegant loop in its direction and finish the job in those parts.   

  

 

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics, Transport