[1] For 170 years, the former Victoria Prison and Central Police Station compound stood aloof in the heart of Hong Kong, visible yet inaccessible – unless you enforced the law or fell on the wrong side of it. Now everyone has a chance to step inside its walls. After a long and arduous conversion into a centre for art and heritage, Hong Kong’s most significant heritage conservation project is finally complete.
[2] Officially christened with its former nickname, Tai Kwun, the Cantonese equivalent of ‘the big house’, the compound now includes art galleries, exhibitions on local history, shops, restaurants and bars. “The philosophy has been very clear from day one,” says Winnie Yeung, Tai Kwun’s head of heritage. “We’re trying to turn a closed-off site that Hong Kong people were familiar with but never had a chance to go inside into a site that is open to the public with easy access.”
[3] That was a challenge like nothing Hong Kong had seen before. The first iteration of Victoria Prison was built in 1841. It was the first permanent structure built by the British in their new colonial possession. With 18 different buildings, some of which are declared monuments, a design that would impose legal restrictions on how a building can be modified – the restoration work was deemed to be particularly complicated.
[4] The Jockey Club, which was asked to lead the restoration project, spared no expense, hiring renowned Swiss architect firm Herzog & de Meuron to design a new arts pavilion for the site, along with a master plan for how to convert the historic site into its new role as a public facility. Their first proposal called for a blindly-towered bamboo scaffold, which it said was furiously rejected by nearby residents, who said it would ruin their views and overshadow the venerable old buildings. Eventually, the architects came up with a plan for two new structures that blend above parts of the old prison compound. One houses a 200-seat auditorium; the other an art gallery. Both are clad in black aluminium blocks that give them the appearance of leather jewellery boxes.
[5] When Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron visited Hong Kong last December, he mapped Tai Kwun, and still seemed disappointed their original vision for the site had been rejected. “We were honestly a bit shocked to find that Hong Kong has neighbourhoods woven into Switzerland, that this would be something about a much much visual transmission,” said Herzog. But the feedback made them realise that what people valued about Tai Kwun was its interior character in a high-rise city. “It’s a horizontal oasis,” he said. “It has always been an attractive space just waiting to be discovered by the public.”
[6] Herzog describes the final design as “less radical”, but with the same goal of opening up a space that had long been sealed off. “A community gathering place, even the toughest of communities, has additions that won’t be controversial. “Many people feel they are totally out of place and I personally think they’re too heavy. They dominate the entire site,” says neighbourhood activist Katy Law, who is the convenor of the Central and Western District Concern Group.
[7] Others defend the new additions. “When we talk about heritage conservation now, we talk about adaptive reuse – giving a building new life. There’s only so much you can do with the existing buildings,” said architect and urban planner from Cheung Lai-wa. “The point is not to mimic the old but to distinguish the old from the new,” he said. “It’s about authenticity.”
[8] There have been some missteps. In 2016, a wall in one of the site’s oldest buildings collapsed during an attempt to reinforce it. And the Jockey Club has been criticised for failing to preserve some of the non-architectural heritage, such as old fixtures, life graffiti, that has been left by prisoners on the walls of the cells. “The renovation is sometimes excessive, overly new, leading to a loss of the original patina of the heritage buildings,” says Law.
[9] That criticism is echoed by art critic John Batten, who sat on one of Tai Kwun’s advisory committees. “But, each time the buildings will evolve into a new conservation and function. I was sat in a committee college last May. And that new function will be one markedly different from its past role. “What we’ve noticed is that neighbours will just drop by in the evening to meet up with their friends because Central doesn’t have many open spaces,” says Yeung.
[10] Tai Kwun’s new life as a public gathering space was one of the reasons its inaugural heritage exhibition, 100 Faces, focuses on its presence in the surrounding neighbourhood. The history of Tai Kwun itself is conveyed through eight storytelling spaces scattered throughout the site. Some of the history deals with well-known figures like Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who was jailed in Victoria Prison, to the well Hong Kong as a base from who to plot his revolutionary war against France. But other stories are more humble in scope. One of Yeung’s favourites is from the owner of a Sheung Wan printing press.
[11] “When the owner was still a very young boy, he’d cut at when he was sleeping at night,” she says. “His father has to get up early the next morning, get his mother his shirts to fit his shirts, all the way to Cemetery Lane next to the prison and get them to sleep there – because Victoria Prison after lights off was the quietest place in Central. It gives you a sense of how the site has always had this very strong connection to the community even though it was supposed to be a jail.”
[12] The walls are still there, but now the gates are open – and a new chapter of history has begun. More than just a museum, or an art gallery, or an historic site, Tai Kwun is a place that brings many different threads of Hong Kong life together. “We’ve never done such a large-scale conservation and revitalisation project all in one go,” says Yeung. “In Hong Kong, in the past we’ve always just conserved one building and then another. This is conserving an entire site – a place.”