18
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
Territories, developed and became, in part, a factory town. The textile industry was the quickest to expand, followed by enamelware, rubber footwear and plastics. Steel rolling mills supplied the raw material of the building boom.
The big merchant houses and banks began to raise multi- storey office blocks and to build apartment houses for their staffs. Conspicuous among these was the Bank of China building, a monolith in grey granite, which rose alongside the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank. In the same year Edinburgh House, a ten-storey office block, replaced one of the oldest buildings in central Victoria. A local journal re- marked: 'To the Hong Kong businessman moving from the old-fashioned buildings, with their 16 to 18 feet ceiling heights, these lower ceilings (ten feet) might feel a bit de- pressing. On the other hand, the clean, plain finish of the walls gives an illusion of greater spaciousness. . . .'
Some of the new apartment blocks compared in luxury and finish with any in Europe or America; some, regrettably, were not so good. The apparently insatiable demand for housing and the quick profits to be realized from investment in property encouraged the speculative builder, concerned only with the maximum profit in the shortest possible time, and heedless of either the durability or appearance of his building or the comfort of his tenants. Demand for accom- modation far out-stripping! the supply, rents in the new buildings were high . . . . in good and bad alike.
Nevertheless, there was much good, solid building being done. There was more building on Victoria Peak. Outlying districts, such as Stanley Village and the environs of Repulse Bay on the Island and the Tai Po Road on the mainland, which before the war had been sparsely developed, started to become fashionable dormitory areas. More inaccessible sites were brought into use, often at heavy cost in cutting back the hillside and in levelling the ground. One block of flats was in a cutting so deep that the top of the structure was barely above the level of the nearest road, and the
I