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HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
volunteers from the Life-Guard Club and the 53 professional life-guards of the Urban Services Department. The beaches are also cleaned and regulated by Urban Services staff. At two of the principal beaches a contractor provides changing tents for hire, whilst elsewhere sites for beach huts may be rented for five years or huts themselves rented annually as a result of a ballot. Refreshments are also put out to tender at the large beaches, at some of which cafés or hotels of various standards are also available.
There are also a number of popular beaches in the New Territories which are controlled by the District Administra- tion as regards hire of beach-huts and tents, scavenging, life saving and other duties. In 1957 for the first time a group of nine qualified life-guards, who had undergone training in both life-saving and elementary first-aid, were on duty at New Territories beaches.
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The shortage of land in the built-up areas has meant that the development of parks and playgrounds can only take place in keen competition with other forms of development offering a more direct economic return. Before the war, playgrounds were few; after the war, these were at best dusty and uneven pieces of land or at worst soon covered by the ubiquitous squatters. Despite these difficulties, the old playgrounds have been rehabilitated and new ones laid out. These playgrounds vary in size from the Victoria Park, occupying 53 acres on land reclaimed from a former typhoon shelter, to small children's playgrounds which were being developed at the end of the year on scraps of land left over at road-junctions.
There are 130 acres of parks, public playgrounds and rest gardens, including the Botanic Gardens and Victoria Park, which provide nine association football, five miniature foot- ball, two hockey, one rugby football and three cricket grounds, all grass covered, together with 16 basketball and eleven miniature football grounds on hard surfacing. Of the