Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1966-1967 — Page 48

end of the year, plans for the structures, which the restaurant owners will be permitted to build at their own expense, were ready, and the necessary amendments to the ordinance and regulations to permit the charging of rent for use of the land were in hand. The standard size of the outside seating extension will probably be about 550 square feet.

99. The need for properly constructed flues makes different arrange- ments necessary in the newer estates. In the Mark III blocks, there are rather larger and specially designed premises for restaurants at the end of a number of blocks. This enables their operators to conform more closely with the requirements of the licensing authority which, while sympathetic with the practical difficulties, is nevertheless justifiably averse to the one and two-bay restaurants of the older estates. In the sixteen-storey Mark IV estates flues are not practicable and in any case the ground floor is unsuitable for restaurants because of the load-bearing walls. The answer here is to provide free-standing buildings which, to begin with at least, will be single-storey. The first of these restaurants will be in Ham Tin and Shck Lei estates, the drawings for which provide an internal seating area in each restaurant of 1,368 square feet, plus kitchen, store, lavatory, etc.

HAWKERS

100. No account of retail trading in the estates would be complete without a reference to the hawkers, who supply an extensive demand for a wide range of goods from food of all kinds to clothing and simple kitchen hard-ware at minimum prices. Hawking also provides a whole or part-time occupation through which many households can supplement their income, and a high proportion of hawkers are themselves resident in the estates. Nevertheless they present problems to the management of an estate, and even in cottage and factory areas. The sale of food under unhygienic conditions, the difficulty of moving the stalls so that the area can be properly cleaned, the damage to ground surfaces and to the walls of buildings, the blocking of surface drainage channels with refuse, the competition they afford to shopkeepers with higher overheads, the occupation of much of the limited amount of open space available and originally intended for recreation or other purposes, and the creation of traffic hazards, are all well-known problems throughout the urban areas of Hong Kong. If the unfortunate results of hawking are more con- spicuous in some of the estates, this is largely because of the greater reliance which the residents of such areas place on this form of market- ing and because the hawker bazaars attract shoppers from adjacent

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