STANDING ROOM ONLY

The thing to remember about Hong Kong is to look up.

We think that England - as an island - is too small for sixty million people to call home. The tabloids cry “We’re full! Immigrants go home!” while others battle the expansion of cities gobbling up the green belt.

Hong Kong - at the last count - is home to over seven million people on a meagre eighty square kilometres. There really is no more room here. So much so, they’re busy reclaiming land around the fringes like a dress being let out for a girl who tried and failed to slim for her turn as a bridesmaid. England, by comparison, is that tedious skinny friend you want to slap. “I only have to look at food and I put on weight!” she cries as she slips into a size eight with a whimsical whimper. England - once you’ve reclaimed Dartmoor, the Yorkshire wolds and half of Wales, come back to us and get measured again. I want to see Barratt homes on all your green bits.

When buildings are constructed here, they’re built upwards - not outwards. It’s something easy to forget when you’re on street level, but if you take a bus, say from Island Resort to Causeway Bay, you can see that Hong Kong is like an island of giant’s fingers, prodding the sky through the haze. They look like behemoths jostling for position on the smallest patch of land they could possibly find. Standing room only.

As I stared out of the bus window on the way to a birthday party, I watched the bleeding orange sun sinking behind a mountain, making silhouettes of the skyscrapers, each layer varying in a smoggy brown matte in an impossibly endless forest of concrete. I had a vision of two hundred years hence then - this would be the future of the human race. Busy, crowded and beautiful at the same time.

In each tower, there can be thousands of apartments and offices, malls, cinemas, restaurants and cafes, shops and bars and meeting places. The complex I’m in at the moment consists of six towers - each containing thousands of people. For the benefit of those living here, it also boasts a huge terrace, a shopping mall, a gym, two swimming pools (the outdoor one is closed because it’s a positively freezing 30c), a band room, piano rooms, study rooms, a bowling alley and a kid’s playroom. It’s entirely possible for someone to live their entire life out inside their own complex and never have to leave its boundaries.

Of course, people don’t do that in real life. On any given night, Causeway Bay (to use an example) is a scrum of people, jostling to get where they want to be beneath flashing neon signs and advertisements - a plethora of beacons guiding you this way and that. It is Blade Runner’s metropolis given flesh.

On one particular corner, as you wait at the curb edge for the ticking clock of the pedestrian crossing to allow you to cross the road, one comes face to face with a cast of hundreds - all random, all with their minds elsewhere. They’re chatting on their iphones, carrying stuff, holding the hands of their kids... and in a moment - once the little green man shows - they’re going to come towards you all at once. And it’s a little bit terrifying. 

Space, as you’ve probably guessed, is at a premium here. Apartments are tiny and expensive - and this has knock-on effects. For example, what would you do about your washing? The solution is to hang it out of the window on a rack. Look up at any apartment block and ten, twenty, thirty floors up, trousers, shirts and pants are hanging out of the windows drying on their pegs. It makes me wonder if Hong Kong is particularly known for its strong line in pegs - and missing items of clothing. The sea breeze is quite strong here - and there’s a lot of coast line for it to blow in from. What would it take for a pair of trousers to go sailing through the air and land on someone else’s rack or wrap themselves around some bamboo scaffolding?

Yes, you read that correctly. The scaffolding here is entirely bamboo. Men in hard hats climb hundreds of feet in the air up seemingly flimsy structures of wood that sway and groan in the wind. Looking down out of your flat window can be a dizzying affair, but looking up from the street can be much worse.

It’s all a matter of perspective.