Adaptive Re-Use: Producing Neo-Victorian Space in

Elizabeth Ho

Abstract: As a former British colony, Hong Kong struggles to reconcile itself to its Chinese identity. The need to manage colonial spaces that evoke ‘unsafe’ memories – but without demolishing examples of the territory’s colonial architecture and history – has become a priority. While “adaptive re-use” projects promote conservation and preservation, an unintended and much desired side effect is decolonisation. In this essay, I claim adaptive re-use as a neo-Victorian spatial practice sought by the Hong Kong government to control and sanitise public space against the chaos and urgency of native streets in much the same way as did Hong Kong’s nineteenth-century colonial administrators. This essay is a study of 1881: Heritage, the transformation of the former Marine Police Headquarters into a heritage hotel, museum and luxury shopping center. Via tourist snapshots and wedding portraits, the public’s use of 1881: Heritage reclaims and transforms the space into a site of intimacy, offering a new approach to experiencing the production of Victorian space in and for the present.

Keywords: 1881: Heritage, adaptive re-use, architecture, British colonialism, conservation, decolonization, Hong Kong, intimacy, public space.

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Hong Kong’s urban rather than textual landscape provides the best examples of the traces of the Victorian in the one-time British colony and, in their preservation, the best examples of postcolonial neo- Victorianism. Neo-Victorian impulses in Hong Kong’s built environment can be seen, for example, in the drastic conservation efforts taken to preserve the nineteenth-century architecture of Murray House located in Central, the heart of the old City of Victoria. Originally built in 1846 as barracks for British officers, the government decided to dismantle Murray House in 1982, the year 332 Elizabeth Ho ______Margaret Thatcher met Deng Xiaoping in Beijing to seal Hong Kong’s fate, to make way for the capitalist icon of ‘New China’, the Bank of China Tower. The more than 3000 fragments were stored for re-use “in a brick shed near reservoir” (Manuel 1995: 2), until they were retrieved in 2001 to reconstruct Murray House as a complex of restaurants on Stanley’s waterfront promenade. The building owed its new life to the final phase of the Hong Kong Housing Authority’s ‘Ma Hang Village’ project: the major redevelopment and rehousing of a squatter village to provide public housing, a primary school, parking lot, shopping center and promenade to enhance Stanley, on the south side of the island, as a tourist destination and residential area.1 The reconstructed building subsequently lost its Grade I heritage status after antiquities experts deemed that its historical authenticity had depreciated due to its relocation (Wong 2007: n.p.). Murray House derives its postcolonial neo-Victorian identity not from the faithful preservation of its nineteenth-century attributes but from the modifications that resulted in its reclassification as a ‘new building’ and the government’s repurposing of it as an unusual form of decolonisation and recolonisation enacted through the heritage process. Although vacated of its colonial context and importance, a Victorian-era military building was re-sited to partially replace and then legitimise what was essentially an area of illegality and disorder operating off the grid of economic reproduction and out of government control. This disappearance of the Victorian from one location and its reappearance or reinsertion in another indicates unexpected neo-imperialist and other hegemonic tendencies at play. Tracing Hong Kong’s adaptive re-use projects thus helps to map contemporary place-based struggles for identity while facilitating new intimacies with the past. Reading the politics of neo-Victorian space can alert us to acts of neo-imperialism in the present, too often abstracted as space or heritage, and reveal the diversity of hybridising practices in the imagination of a future postcolonial geography. The remnants of Hong Kong’s nineteenth-century colonial infrastructure, British military presence, and religious and juridical edifices remain visible across the territory despite a belated and lukewarm heritage policy overseen by a haphazard array of

1 For further information about this project, see: http://www.housingauthority.gov.hk/arpt9900/eng/building/build_mh.html.