REVIEW
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figure totalling only 55% in the case of domestic premises and 150% in the case of business premises. There the level of controlled rents has remained ever since-proposals in 1956 for further changes in rent controls having been even more violently opposed.
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The post-war mood of Europe, which favoured the planned rebuilding of blitzed cities, had its repercussions in Hong Kong. In 1948, the Government collected material for the visit of Sir Patrick Abercrombie, who had drawn up plans for the rebuilding of London. Sir Patrick noted: 'In com- paring Hong Kong with many other places, two special characteristics of its problems at once emerge Firstly, the shortage of land for any sort of urban expan- sion
Secondly, an unlimited reservoir of possible immigration.' Sir Patrick recommended the building of new towns on the outskirts of Kowloon and in the New Terri- tories; the zoning of the Colony into industrial and resi- dential areas; the removal of military bases from urban centres; and the construction of a cross-harbour tunnel, linking Victoria with Kowloon. These were drastic and expensive measures, which still might have been feasible if Hong Kong had been able to snatch two or three years of tranquillity in the hazardous post-war world. But this was not to be. As events and people crowded upon the Colony, the planners found themselves more and more absorbed in immediate problems. Yet the signposts erected by the Abercrombie Report have not been forgotten nor their broad directions obscured.
Sir Patrick had observed: 'The population (of Hong Kong) has become used to densities which over large areas— not in small black spots-must be some of the highest in the world.' At that time (in 1948) the population was about 1,800,000. Within two years it was to increase by another half million. Hong Kong, already packed to the limits of its tattered fabric, achieved a new urban density of over 50,000 to the square mile--one of the highest, if not the highest, in the world.