RECEIVED IN
REGISTRY No.51
HKK1/9
Sir Leslie Monson KONG CB Foreign & Commonwealth Office London SW1
BRITISH EMBASSY,
COPENHAGEN.
5 March 1971
Mr Laurd for
Lo
116
Commenti plase
MY Welford
Mr Scanlon! Mr Royle.
7
and as
Des Leslie,
13
Many thanks for your letter of 25 February. I will be in London on Monday, 3 May, and will gladly call on you to discuss plans for my sabbatical. I hope these will be pretty far advanced by then, but the postal strike has set me much further back than I had hoped. Broadly speaking my plan is as follows:-
3 May
9 June
Pick up non-confidential briefs (being prepared in Hong Kong) and take them and other solid reading on Hong Kong to my home in Scotland where I will stay till
when I meet David Trench. At that point I would gladly stay in London for a week or 2 to do confidential reading and meet any people who the Department think I should at that stage.
Thereafter I would do some visiting of cities in the UK. John Moore of Information Services has agreed to lay this on, but my correspondence with specialists has been blocked by the strike and I could not outline a programme to you at this stage. The object of all this would be to get a quick general impression of the techniques of running big cities in the UK as well as of some specialist problems like city planning, slum clearance, technical education, containerisation, traffic control, etc.
With some smattering of the subject in my head I would then like to see something of how these problems are tackled in circumstances more comparable to Hong Kong, eg perhaps in Singapore, Japan or even South America.
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