136
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yours. The Committee considered that it would be useless to attempt to make a time-table for the expenditure, since this would depend on indeterminates such as building potential and availability of teaching staff.
2. Site.
A University Committee of 1939 recommended the removal of the University to a site outside the very crowded municipal limits of Hong Kong. The present site of remarkable natural beauty, on a hill sloping sharply to the harbour had become for Hong Kong what the Collego gardens are for Cambridge and Oxford, but it was never planned as a whole and hence has been used very uneconomically. A consideration that favoured the transfer of the University to a. now site was that it was impeding the natural growth of the city of Victoria. A Committee in 1940 reconsidered the whole matter with great care and produced plans and drawings to show that properly used the site could easily accommodate a University twice as large as Hong Kong University then was. Provision to moet municipal claims was made by a proposal to surrender part of the site for town extension and for road construction compensation was to be found by extensions on to unoccupied Government land north and west of the University, and by the acquisition of a small site in the Now Territories for a survey camp. It showed that by levelling and filling, the oxisting inadequate space for games could be greatly increased. On the basis of the information at its disposal, the Committee favoured the acceptance of the proposals of this Committee and has assumed in the following estimatos that the University will be developed on the present sito.
3. Restoration of existing buildings.
Estimates of the cost of repairs immediately necessary to the existing buildings can bo little more than guesses based on the cost of typhoon-damage repairs before the war. There was no information available to the Committee on the current costs of building in Hong Kong, on the prices of building materials which, with the exception of brick, and coment will have to be imported. The Committee accepted the following ostimate of the cost of repairs:·
Arts, Administration and Student's Union
Science
Medical
Engineering
Library Buildings
Hostels and Staff Houses
...
£15,000
£5,000
£8,000
£
5,000
£ 3,000 £10,000
£ 46,000
4. Now Buildings
The plans of the 1940 Committoo onvisagod the rebuilding of the greater part of the existing University. On the basis of these plans, taking into account the availability of new accommodation such as that for research work in Marine Zoology already provided in the plans for the now Fisheries Research Institute), and assuming that full use would be made of existing structures (for example, that the Science building completed in
/1941