歷
Left The living-cum-dining room looking towards the entrance hall and (above) looking towards the passage between the two bedrooms. The bedroom and kitchen are shown below.
Although designed as a low cost housing development, the accommodation and facilities provided compare very favourably with other large and more expensive blocks of flats constructed in the Colony during the post war era.
Each block is served by two first class automatic lifts of latest design, one for passengers and one for service. The flat roofs of the blocks are partly covered by pierced concrete sunshades, and provide large open areas for sun- bathing and as playing areas for the children.
The flats themselves vary in size, as the first block provides for ten larger flats with living, dining room, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen and servants' rooms, and ten smaller flats designed to accommodate young married
couples with small families, having a living-dining room, two bedrooms and one bathroom with the usual kitchen and servants' rooms. The other two blocks are all composed of the smaller type of flats with two bedrooms in each.
The arrangement of the flats themselves is very simple, being designed to provide the maximum amount of usable floor space in as concentrated an area as possible. For that reason there are no wide entrance lobbies nor are there long passages connecting isolated rooms. The main apartment area has been divided by a single glass partition, by means of which the living room, entrance hall and dining room areas are separated yet remain miraculously one unit. Each apart- ment has a generously proportioned wide covered verandah, to which the principal bedroom also has access.
A small compradore shop was recently completed within the site boundaries and this shop, now in opera- tion,
provides tenants with most general provisions and renders unnecessary" daily excursions to the Kowloon shopping district. This together with the surrounding gardens and area to the rear of the buildings reserved for tennis courts and recreation, has resulted in a modern self-containing housing development.
In order to eliminate the unsightliness that would have been caused by having twenty independent aerials on each roof, it was decided to use the Belling & Lee communal aerial system.
The spacing of the buildings one from another is such as to permit the whole of the necessary aerial system to be suspended from three masts only, one per block. These masts are mounted on the centres of the upper roofs over the lift machinery and are of solid drawn galvanised steel tube with appropriate stay Attings, finials, head pulleys, footing plates, stays and turnbuckles, all of which are also galvanised. The aerials of which there are six in all are formed of hard drawn cadmium copper strand and span between the masts end to end in pairs at two different levels, the inner halves of each of the two lower spans being dummies.
The number of floors is ideal permitting as it does the connection in one simple straight vertical run of the optimum number of ten outlet points to each aerial. These vertical runs, of which there are two in each building, comprise twin polystyrene insulated cable screened with copper braid and overlaid with an outer protective coating of polyvinyl chloride. The cable is drawn into conduit concealed in the fabric of the building consisting of small bore light gauge copper tube, of which all joints are sweated together to provide the best possible electrical continuity. These copper conduits are solidly earthed at their lower ends and provide the means by which a good earth connection for the tenants radio is made avail- able at the aerial earth outlet point in each flat.
Each special cable system run in these conduits draws radio frequency energy from its particular aerial through a matching transformer and passes it out through further isolat- ing_transformers located at each outlet point. By this means each fat occupant is provided with the electrical equivalent of an average individual outside aerial and gets good signal strength on short medium and long wave bands without interaction with his neighbours, while all the disadvantages, aesthetic and otherwise, attendant upon the erection of a multiplicity of bamboo poles and bits of wire by a multiplicity of persons are avoided.
All specialised material used was manufactured in England by Messrs. Belling & Lee Ltd., and the installation was carried out by Gilman & Co., Ltd.
The architects responsible for the design and super- vision of this work were Messrs. Palmer & Turner.
General Contractor: Sang Hop Construction Co. Lifts: Otis Elevator Company.
Crittall Windows: Dodwell & Co., Ltd.
Electrical Installation: China Engineers Ltd.
Plumbing: Dodwell & Co., Ltd.
Snowcem: Green Island Cement Co., Ltd.
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.