6
HONG KONG ANNUAL REPORT
widened. Sir Matthew Nathan, Governor of the Colony from 1904 to 1907, had the foresight to build the unusually wide highway which now bears his name, running through the Kowloon peninsula from its southern tip at Tsim Sha Tsui to the base of the Kowloon hills. More or less simul- taneously, the spacious ‘garden lots' of the previous century were being built over and low-lying areas being filled in by the spoil from road and railway construction. An important reclamation at Sham Shui Po, constructed between 1911 and 1928, provided the site for an entire new suburb of Kowloon.
Suburban development was helped by the arrival of motor cars which, from about 1915, began to appear in the Colony in significant numbers. Cars and buses made it possible for town dwellers to live a little further from their work and brought outlying districts, both on the Island and the main- land, into the city orbits. Motor roads on Victoria Peak opened up higher levels for development.
The late 1920's and early 1930's were characterized-by a great and wide-spread building boom. On the Island the Praya east reclamation was built over, while at Kowloon Tong a garden city, was laid out. Small factories producing rubber footwear, textiles, torches and metalware were built in the industrial areas of Kowloon, largely stimulated by the introduction of the Imperial Preference scheme of 1932. Industry began to thrust westwards into the New Territories.
Domestic buildings in this period were taller than before. One of the first steel-framed buildings, the Gloucester Build- ing, erected in 1931, was the forerunner of the skyscrapers to come. Five years later, the concrete mass of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank hoisted its twelve storeys above the business centre of Victoria where it remained unrivalled in height until the 1950's. In Kowloon, with the exception of the Peninsula Hotel, the general level of building before the war remained at three storeys.
Between 1933 and 1937 property-owners experienced a
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