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# HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
Heritage exists not only in its abstract forms of performing arts, local religious practices, festivals and traditional customs and life-style, but also in its physical forms of historical architecture, archaeological relics and antiquities which bear witnesses to the vanishing or already vanished culture. Heritage is therefore part of our total environment which is sometimes called the 'built environment' as in contrast to the 'natural environment'. Anti-pollution and conservation of open space and green areas are measures to save our 'natural environment' while anti-vandalism and conservation of architectural and cultural heritage are measures to save our 'built environment'. All are well within the aims and responsibilities of any municipal councils which should make our cities the best places to live in. Cities without historical heritage will have no identity, no character, boring, and shall also become, indeed, superficial.
It would therefore be both self-damaging to the Council's own image and culturally disastrous to the public if the Council knows only how to launch huge constructional programmes of ultra-modernistic designs but totally neglects the equally urgently needed timely salvation of the limited historical building resources in the urban area which are disappearing very fast. It should also be curious to find that for reasons yet to be further examined, that for years in the past till now, the Council as a whole, except for some individual Councillors perhaps, has not taken up the leading role as it ought to have, on issues of conservation of local heritage. In the eyes of the public, and as far as publicity record goes, the Council has been generally seen as being sceptical, apathetic and even sometimes unsympathetic to current campaigns of heritage protection in the community. Not only that it has been usually silent on heritage issues which were outside UC lands, such as those cases of the old GPO building in the Central and the small Branch Post Office in Wan Chai, but also that it had been very sluggish in responding to requests of final declaration of monuments within UC sites such as the cases of the Han Tomb in Li Cheng Uk and the Flagstaff House in the Victoria Barrack which had taken 10 years before they were allowed to be declared under the Antiquities and Monuments Ordinance. This is quite a big contrast to those municipal councils in Canada which our Council had visited in July last year, where they posed themselves as front-line leaders in their cities on issues of heritage protection, apart from the fact that they, as local authorities, are also doing as much as the Federal or Central Government do when it comes to very important issues.
One fallacy may argue that Hong Kong is different because heritage protection is a function of the Central Government at the moment. The answer is that if the provision of a better living environment (both ‘built' and ‘natural”) in the city is the aim of the Council under its wide-ranged services to the community, some areas of objectives and responsibilities are bound to overlap with some of those in the Central Government. We cannot say that since anti-pollution is the duty of the Environmental Protection Department, then the Council will not need to clean the streets; since education is the duty of the Education Department and the Universities, then the Council will not need to provide public libraries and museums.
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# HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
On the contrary, by the very nature of its being a territory-wide policy to protect the 'built environment', as much as anti-pollution is for protection of the 'natural environment', its better success in implementation can only be assured by a very wide support across the community, which should include both the men on the street and the municipal Councillors. What sort of hope can we envisage if such are being constantly cold-shouldered by our community leaders in the policies Council? What sort of image that the Council has been building for itself if it continues to shy away from heritage protection duties and dare not to face challenges related to any possible controversies arisen therefrom? When will this attitude of the Council change?
To the conservationists public, the Council's image was at its lowest ebb in 1978 when even the compromised proposal for the KCR building as advanced by the Antiquities Advisory Board under the Chairmanship of the then DUS Mr. Brian WILSON, keeping only the clock-tower and some colonades, was turned down and the whole building was bulldozered thereafter except the clock tower. In 1987-88, however, through the good works of Dr. Philip Kwok, Chairman of the Museum Select Committee, the Council was convinced to allow both the Han Tomb and the Flagstaff House, both being top monuments in the territory, declared as monuments, and this had greatly improved the Council's image since then. I hope that this improved image and spirit of the Council shall continue and be further consolidated by other similar events. Without going into great details, I would like to point out specifically that there are currently at least 3 important heritage conservation exercises fully within the Council's jurisdiction that will offer opportunities to the Council to further consolidate its improved image and spirit under discussion. They are:
(1) The Conservation of the Headland area of the Lyemun Barrack as a War Museum (or Pacific War Museum)
Any of our colleagues who have been born before the War should know the significance of this place during the 1941 Defence War for Hong Kong in which many British, Canadian, Indian and Chinese servicemen had offered their lives in witnessing one of the bloodiest battles against the Japanese landing forces at that time. This is a very important piece of local history in an indisputably important site while Hong Kong is already lagging behind many other countries in the world by the absence of a worthy War Museum, and this fact has been disappointing many visitors every year. This site is strategically located at the northern coastal headland of the entire Lyemun Barrack, guarding the Lyemun Strait together the fortresses at the Devil's Hill on the other side of the water. The existing military installations include a unique redoubt, many tunnel systems and batteries and the Brenan Torpedo launching ramp is even found as the only remaining sample-relic outside U.K., according to military historians. The whole area is almost a ready-made war museum which is better than the one in the Stone-Cutters Island and comparable to the one at San Tosa Island in Singapore. The AAB recommended both the War Museum and its subsequent declaration in 1987 and Dr. Patrick HAYES of the Department had