Stuart Wolfendale

Grade One monuments: elsewhere, these words would be looked upon keenly as a permission for a valued structure to be kept as it is, on the spot. In Hong Kong, they are words in the game of clear, flatten and develop in which items are removed from their location and kept as they never were in a place they were never remotely intended for.

Remote is an important word in this game. Recall if you can the Murray Barracks Officers’ Mess, circa 1846, which ended up as the Rating Department building and stood where the China Bank Tower is. They took it down in bits in 1982 and hid the parts for years then assembled it again on the far side of the bay at Stanley. In its appeal to the senses it was rather as though you had taken down Inigo Jones’ Banqueting Hall in Whitehall and put it up again by the sands at Torquay.

As I never go to Torquay, nor do I go into Stanley so I have not set eyes on the Murray Barracks Officers Mess for twenty five years. I am now wondering where Queen’s Pier and the Star Ferry clock tower might be sent so that I might never see them again too.

I am not hugging my pillow in anxiety over this. I have no great interest in the structures themselves. The new Lego version of Queen’s Pier will hardly be one at all without its floor, its steps and its water pilings. They were undistinguished save for the spots they stood on and the purposes they served over years. Yanking them like teeth and bedding them into cotton wool countryside serves to erase real interest in them as you would from Grand Central Station by dropping it on Guam.

Still, I cannot help but imagine where they could be put so that I and many, many others will never see them again, without at least working up a coach party.

Part of Yuen Long springs to mind, though which one I cannot tell because I know nothing of Yuen Long and this makes it a hot contender. There is a football field at the edge of Mei Foo between the Tsing Kwai Highway and the Kwai Chung Road, near the Container Terminal and close to the end of human habitation as we know it which would be just perfect as a site.

How do I know it? I passed it once at great speed on the way to the airport and in a moment of vacancy it lodged my mind and I wished it on David Beckham for the end of his career, to test his dedication to grass roots football. For somewhere both prominent and impossible, I suggest , for Queen’s Pier, the very top of the Peak, at end of Mount Austin Road, between the public loo and the radio mast. The pathos of it standing there looking out to sea but 1,800 feet above it might impress on those who see it the cynicism of the system. They can stick the clock tower on top of it for the kites to tell the time. All I can tell is they’ll never get me up there.

Posted in All, environment