Earlier this year, the Fringe Club hosted an exhibition titled 'Hong Kong: Beautiful City, Ugly Places'. It reinforced my long-held opinion that Hong Kong is an unattractive city in an attractive setting.
Imagine for a moment that Hong Kong was entirely flat - no green hills, no harbour. Still a 'beautiful city'? How many truly beautiful buildings can you name in Hong Kong? How many truly picturesque neighbourhoods? Our civic pride is certainly not expressed in the quality of our buildings; most of our architecture is mediocre, much of it downright bad. Our aesthetic sense, in everything from railings and walls to footbridges and underpasses, is notable for its absence.
What is beautiful - country paths, ancient footpaths, heritage buildings or neighbourhoods - we conspire to despoil or demolish, or constrain with banisters and barricades. Where we try harder, we often confuse quality with kitsch.
Should Hong Kong revert to obscurity, future historians and archaeologists will ask: 'How is it that one of the wealthiest cities in human history can have left so little to posterity? Where are the civic and religious buildings? Where are the palaces of the rich?'
One has only to have a passing familiarity with history to know that every powerful and wealthy city over the course of human civilisation has invested some of its civic pride in the erection of buildings of timeless quality. Take but one example: Venice - a city, like ours, dedicated to commerce, a shameless oligarchy for over 1,000 years, whose city fathers and wealthy families spared neither effort nor money to beautify their city.
I despair when I compare the confident spirit and civic pride of the Venetians with the emasculated spirit increasingly to be found in our city. Looking out of my window, I see the new Tamar government office rapidly rising, a building whose monstrous size is matched by its banality. It was designed and is being built in an unseemly rush, and it shows. Our Central Library is a carbuncle.Our chief concert hall occupies a prime waterfront site but has no view of the harbour, and is dressed in a tile often found on the exterior of public toilets. I cannot think of a single private family home in Hong Kong to match the palazzi or residences along the canals of Venice or Suzhou. We invest very little aesthetic care in our churches (speaking as a Catholic, I make no comment on other religious buildings).