REVIEW OF THE YEAR
and function of the existing Statue Square. To the east in a natural arena formed by the foothills of the Island's main feature, the observer could see the beginnings of what is to be the Colony's athletic stadium-a fine and popular conception which will be capable of seating 29,500 spectators at football and athletic contests, and which reflects the ever-increasing enthusiasm among all sections of the community for western sport in nearly all its manifestations.
Beyond the range of the Kowloon Hills to the north, and so beyond the view of the urban observer, work commenced on the Tai Lam Chung dam and reservoir. This is an $80 million, five year project of enormous importance to every man, woman and child in the Colony. In 1953, as in all recent years, no day passed without water restrictions in some degree. In the winter months, supply was at times limited to five hours a day, but worse than this, the Colony is never in those months free from the threat of a dangerous, and perhaps disastrous, water shortage. Here, in the Tai Lam Chung valley, is the answer; perhaps not all the water everyone wants all day long, but the answer to the dread prospects of a desperate water famine such as occurred in 1929 and which is much more to be feared with the inflated population of today. Tai Lam Chung is for the future, and more than any other material project of 1953 it symbolizes the confidence in Hong Kong's future of both the Government and the people.
So much for the big schemes, the community services and the high buildings. There is another feature of the landscape which our observer could see with great ease and, if he were a kindly man, with great regret. The slopes rising from certain, predominantly industrial, parts of the urban area, are covered with flimsy, disreputable shacks so tightly packed that they seem to elbow each other off the precarious cliffs to which they cling. They are the homes of some 250,000 people, possibly one-eighth of the Colony's whole population. This is Hong Kong's
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