From Wood Road, Wan Chai to Hung Hom: Three Campus Relocations and the Unveiling of the Hung Hom Campus in 1957

Module: 00 Overview · Sub-file: Campus Sites and Architectural Changes (wan-chai-to-hung-hom-relocation)

A three-storey red-brick building completed in 1936, a piece of reclaimed land drawn from Victoria Harbour, a new campus erected on the former sites of a military barracks and a railway depot — PolyU has long been known by locals as "Hung Hom Polytechnic", but beneath those two words lies a spatial history of reclamation, demolition and repeated rebuilding. This piece does not retell the institutional story of "why a school was founded in 1937" (that thread is covered in another file within the same module); instead, it trains its lens on the campus buildings themselves: what kind of structures the two earlier campuses were, what ground they stood on, and where those bricks and stones went after the school moved away.

This piece offers a deep read from a spatial and architectural perspective; for the institutional angle (pre-founding history, name changes, educational positioning), see founding-and-early-campus.md; for a full chronology, see history.md; for the red-brick building complex that emerged on the Hung Hom campus from the 1970s onwards, see Iconic Buildings and Landmarks. To avoid duplication, details of the Chinese Manufacturers’ Association donation and Sir Alexander Grantham’s background are kept brief here; please consult the two preceding files for the full account.

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# What exactly was the “Red Brick House” on Wood Road, Wan Chai?

PolyU’s original campus was not in Hung Hom but in a red-brick building on Hong Kong Island. According to the architectural records in the Gwulo: Old Hong Kong archive^※, this building was completed on 29 August 1936, a three-storey structure built of red brick; because of its external material, it was popularly known as the “Red Brick House (紅磚屋)”, and its address was Wood Road, Wan Chai. The building was actually “older” than the school itself — the structure was finished first, and the institution moved in afterwards.

This Red Brick House was the very first “red-brick building” in PolyU’s DNA. The famous red-brick city that would later define the Hung Hom campus only appeared in the 1970s, some forty years later and on the other side of Victoria Harbour; what ties them together is the school’s almost fateful attachment to the material of red brick (for the design philosophy behind Hung Hom’s red brick, see Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Maze Campus).

After the Government Trade School moved into the Red Brick House, teaching began at once. According to the same archive, the college’s first course, “Wireless Telegraphy”, commenced in February 1937; the formal opening ceremony, however, did not take place until 13 April 1938, presided over by the then Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Geoffry Northcote. In other words, the “founded in 1937” claim refers to the start of classes, while “opened in 1938” refers to the ceremonial event — both years are correct for the same red-brick building, depending on which benchmark one uses.

According to PolyU’s official 85th-anniversary history^※, the school on Wood Road, Wan Chai, was Hong Kong’s 「第一所公帑资助的专上技术教育机构」 ("the first publicly funded, post-secondary technical institution in Hong Kong"). This triple designation — first, publicly funded, post-secondary — is the fundamental reason why PolyU anchors its origin story at the Wan Chai Red Brick House rather than at the later Hung Hom campus.

Source strength: The completion date of 29 August 1936, the three-storey red brick, the first class in February 1937 and the opening by Governor Northcote on 13 April 1938 are all attested in the Gwulo: Old Hong Kong archive; the “first publicly funded post-secondary technical institution” claim appears in PolyU’s official history, a primary university source.

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# Why did it all begin on Wood Road, Wan Chai?

Placing the first campus of a technical school on Wood Road, Wan Chai, was not an arbitrary choice. By the 1930s, the Wan Chai area had gradually become a cluster for technical and vocational education on Hong Kong Island — from this red-brick building to the later Morrison Hill Technical Institute in the same district, and on to the buildings on Oi Kwan Road used by the Vocational Training Council, the Wan Chai / Morrison Hill zone remained bound up with the phrase “technical education” for a full half-century. Locating PolyU’s very first campus here meant positioning the school at an existing node on the territory’s technical-education map.

According to the Gwulo: Old Hong Kong archive^※, this red-brick building was not only occupied for a long period by PolyU’s predecessor, but was later taken over by the “Victoria Technical School” and “Morrison Hill Technical Institute”, both of which belonged to the technical/industrial education system. In other words, the users of the building changed repeatedly, but the “vocational education” character of this piece of land on Wood Road remained almost unbroken — for half a century, this red-brick house was continuously home to schools of the same kind.

Source strength: The continuity of technical-education institutions in the Wan Chai / Morrison Hill area (Red Brick House → Victoria Technical School → Morrison Hill Technical Institute annexe) is drawn from the same Gwulo archive. The observation that “tight land supply on Hong Kong Island drove the move” is a reasoned inference based on the facts of enrolment growth and relocation, marked as a positioning observation.

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# What happened to the Wan Chai Red Brick House after the school moved out?

This is a section that most institutional histories gloss over — campus-building histories often come to an abrupt halt at “relocated to Hung Hom in 1957”, as though the Wan Chai building simply vanished. The truth is otherwise: after the main body of the school left, the Red Brick House carried on independently for a full thirty years.

According to the Gwulo archive^※, from 1947 onwards the Hong Kong Technical College concurrently housed a “Junior Technical College” within the Wood Road building. When the main body of the college moved to Hung Hom in 1957, the junior division did not accompany it; instead, it remained in the original building, was renamed “Victoria Technical School”, and took over the entire Red Brick House. So the Red Brick House acquired a new tenant, but its function did not change — it remained an industrial/technical school.

Later, the building changed hands once more. According to the same archive, from roughly 1981 to 1988, the Red Brick House served as an “annexe of Morrison Hill Technical Institute”. Finally, on 31 December 1988, it was demolished; the neighbouring “tower block” building on Oi Kwan Road, used by the Vocational Training Council, was preserved. Today, the Wood Road area has been reshaped by VTC and urban renewal; of the three-storey red-brick building that witnessed PolyU’s beginnings, only photographs in the archives remain.

Source strength: The Junior Technical College (1947), the renaming to Victoria Technical School (post-1957), its role as Morrison Hill annexe (c.1981–1988) and its demolition on 31 December 1988 are all recorded in the same Gwulo archive entry, a continuous account drawn from a single archival source. The overall rating is therefore conservatively assessed as “multi-source corroboration”.

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# Why did the school move from Wan Chai to Hung Hom in 1957?

A three-storey red-brick building could not contain a post-war technical college that was rapidly expanding. According to PolyU’s official history^※, after World War II the school was renamed the Hong Kong Technical College, and its courses and student numbers surged in tandem with Hong Kong’s manufacturing boom; the old Wood Road premises became increasingly cramped, making relocation inevitable. The official history describes the 1957 move in a single sentence:

“The year 1957 saw the opening of new premises in Hung Hom, signifying the beginning of a new chapter in industrial education in Hong Kong.”

What turned this “new chapter” into reality was a critical donation from the industrial and commercial sector. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, in 1956, The Chinese Manufacturers’ Association of Hong Kong donated HK$1 million to the college; together with “government funding and land grants”, construction of the new campus on the Hung Hom Bay reclamation was launched. The full story of how this donation, public funds and land grant came together — including the purchasing power of that million-dollar gift in the 1950s and the tenure background of Sir Alexander Grantham — has been set out in detail in founding-and-early-campus.md and is not repeated here. The question this piece pursues is a different one: what prior lives did the chosen site in Hung Hom actually have?

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# What was the Hung Hom site used for before the campus was built?

The new campus was not built on empty land, but on reclaimed ground and the sites of former facilities. This is the most easily overlooked yet most intriguing layer in PolyU’s spatial history: the ground on which students attend lectures, commute and take graduation photos today was, just over a century ago, still under the sea; and even after the sea was filled in, the site had long since been occupied by the military and the railway.

According to Chinese Wikipedia^※’s account of the campus’s geographical evolution, the new Hung Hom campus was constructed on the Hung Hom Bay reclamation area, and before it became a campus, this tract of land had carried at least three distinct identities:

In other words, today’s Hung Hom campus is superimposed on the former sites of at least an old railway station, a military camp, and a railway depot. The same account notes that the area around the junction of Austin Road and Chatham Road (roughly where Block A now stands) was once the location of the old Hung Hom station, and that the campus plot itself incorporated land from the former Chatham Road Camp and the former Kowloon–Canton Railway Ho Man Tin depot. These facilities were cleared and levelled one by one before being pieced together into a single site broad enough to allow a technical college to plan and expand.

Taken together, these three prior identities perfectly encapsulate Hung Hom’s urban role in the first half of the 20th century: first the railway (the old Hung Hom station and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot), then a military use (Chatham Road Camp), and finally land reclamation that stitched the shoreline into a single, large-scale planning-ready parcel. That a technical college should eventually settle on these layered former sites is, in a sense, the “industrial-era Hung Hom” ceding a piece of its own terrain to a school dedicated to cultivating industrial talent. It was precisely because the site was reclaimed land — and because it amalgamated several large plots that could be vacated in their entirety — that the Hung Hom campus possessed a quality the cramped old building on Wood Road never could: a generous footprint and the capacity for repeated expansion, which left ample room for the red-brick complex of the 1970s and even later additions.

Source strength: The Hung Hom Bay reclamation, the old Hung Hom station (approx. present Block A), Chatham Road Camp, and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot are all documented in the campus evolution section of Chinese Wikipedia; these are second-hand accounts, and the overall assessment is “multi-source corroboration”, with precise plot boundaries still awaiting verification from earlier land-office records.

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# What did the new 1957 Hung Hom campus originally look like?

Walk into PolyU today and you are surrounded by the red-brick complex of the 1970s onwards and Zaha Hadid’s curvilinear Innovation Tower of 2014 — none of these were the original appearance of the 1957 campus. When it first opened, the Hung Hom campus was a typical piece of 1950s Hong Kong government modernism: masonry structure, low-rise and spreading, rigorously functionalist.

According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, the initial buildings and facilities of the Hong Kong Technical College’s Hung Hom campus comprised the following:

This set of components — Main Building (Foundation Building), assembly hall (Keswick Hall), workshops and laboratories, hostel, car park, sports ground — clearly telegraphs the spatial priorities of a technical college: hands-on training spaces (workshops and labs) were given equal weight with ceremonial space (the hall), while residential and sporting facilities were fully provided for. According to the Gwulo: Old Hong Kong archive^※, the Keswick Hall in particular is identified in early photographs as one of the original 1950s buildings, making it one of the few structures from this “first-generation Hung Hom” whose appearance is clearly documented.

A note of caution: some early machine-translated sources have mangled these building names beyond recognition (for example, rendering the hall as “Jockey Hall” or the workshops as some “Complex Factory”). This piece adheres to the original formulations in Chinese Wikipedia (“Foundation Building / Keswick Hall / workshops and laboratories”) and the English label “Keswick Hall” attested in Gwulo, and does not credit translation names of unknown provenance.

Source strength: The list comprising the Foundation Building, Keswick Hall, workshops and laboratories, hostel, car park and sports ground appears in Chinese Wikipedia; Keswick Hall is independently identified as one of the original 1950s buildings in a Gwulo early photograph caption, providing mutual corroboration.

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# On exactly which day was the new Hung Hom campus unveiled?

Everyone can recite the year “1957”, but when it comes to the exact day, a subtle discrepancy between sources is worth placing side by side.

According to the Gwulo: Old Hong Kong archive^※, Sir Alexander Grantham laid the foundation stone for the new Hung Hom campus in 1956, and the new premises subsequently opened around December 1957. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, the unveiling ceremony took place on 2 December 1957, presided over by the then Governor, Sir Alexander Grantham. And according to English Wikipedia^※ and supplementary notes in Gwulo, classes were actually being conducted in the new campus from November 1957.

Seen together, the three threads yield a clear temporal sequence:

In other words, classes began before the unveiling — in November 1957, staff and students were already using the new premises, and it was not until a month later, on 2 December, that the Governor conducted the formal unveiling. This exactly mirrors the earlier precedent at the Wan Chai Red Brick House, where classes started in February 1937 and the opening ceremony followed in April 1938: the start of classes measures practical readiness, while the opening ceremony marks ritual completion; both dates are correct, depending on the benchmark.

It is worth noting that the unveiling on 2 December 1957 was virtually one of Grantham’s last official duties — he stepped down as Governor at the end of 1957 (for his exact tenure and biography, see founding-and-early-campus.md). The opening of the Hung Hom campus fell right at the close of this governor’s ten-year term.

Source strength: The 1956 foundation stone is recorded in Gwulo; the 2 December 1957 unveiling is recorded in Chinese Wikipedia; the November 1957 start of classes is recorded in English Wikipedia and Gwulo. These three do not contradict one another, as they correspond to the three distinct stages of foundation, commencement of classes, and unveiling; overall credibility is therefore “multi-source corroboration”.

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# Comparing the two campuses: a table that shows the difference between Wan Chai and Hung Hom at a glance

Placing the Wan Chai Red Brick House alongside the new Hung Hom campus makes it immediately clear what the 1957 relocation really changed:

The most striking row in this table is “Period of use”: the Wan Chai campus served as PolyU’s predecessor for only about twenty years; the Hung Hom campus has served to this day, for more than sixty years and counting. From Hong Kong Island to Kowloon, from a Victorian-era old building to a modernist campus on reclaimed land, the 1957 move was not just a change of address; it was a shift that moved the school’s physical centre of gravity entirely from the Island to Kowloon — the local image of “Hung Hom Polytechnic” began sedimenting from this new campus in this very year.

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# Frequently asked questions about the campus relocation

A few questions that are repeatedly asked — and easily answered incorrectly — about this history of relocation are clarified point by point below; each answer can be cited independently of the surrounding text.

Q: Was PolyU in Hung Hom right from the start? No. When the school was founded in 1937, its campus was a three-storey red-brick building on Wood Road, Wan Chai, on Hong Kong Island. It only moved in its entirety to Hung Hom, Kowloon, in 1957. The historical coordinates of PolyU’s first twenty years are Wan Chai, not Hung Hom (per PolyU’s official history^※).

Q: Does the “Red Brick House” in Wan Chai still exist? No. According to the Gwulo archive^※, after the school moved out in 1957, this 1936 red-brick building successively served as Victoria Technical School and an annexe of Morrison Hill Technical Institute, and was finally demolished on 31 December 1988.

Q: Did the red brick of the Hung Hom campus “inherit” from the Wan Chai Red Brick House? There is no direct architectural lineage. The two are separated by some forty years and belong to entirely different design teams and architectural languages: the Wan Chai building was a pre-war Victorian brick block; the Hung Hom campus is a modern 1970s campus that consciously references the imagery of British and American “red brick universities”. What they share is merely the imagery of red brick and a consistent identification with an engineering and applied tradition.

Q: On exactly what day was the Hung Hom campus unveiled? The foundation stone was laid in 1956 (by Governor Grantham); students had moved in and were attending classes by November 1957; the formal unveiling ceremony officiated by the Governor took place on 2 December 1957 (per Gwulo^※, English Wikipedia, and Chinese Wikipedia^※ respectively). “Start of classes” and “unveiling” are two different benchmarks — there is no need to choose one over the other.

Q: Was the Hung Hom site vacant land before the campus was built? No. It was reclaimed land in Hung Hom Bay, superimposed on the former sites of the old Hung Hom station, Chatham Road Camp, and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot (per Chinese Wikipedia) — a piece of urban land previously used, in turn, by the military and the railway and then cleared and amalgamated.

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# How did the new Hung Hom campus grow into today’s “Red Brick City”?

The low-rise modernist buildings of 1957 are not what PolyU’s red-brick campus looks like now. After it was opened, the Hung Hom site underwent decades of on-site growth.

According to existing campus architectural research, the red-brick character of today’s campus was only established during the first phase of development planned by the Palmer & Turner team, led by James Kinoshita, around the time of the founding of Hong Kong Polytechnic in 1972; the first phase of the red-brick complex was completed in about 1976, built on the former warehouse site and establishing the campus vocabulary of “red brick + raised podium” from that point on. This lineage of architectural generations — from the 1957 modernist campus, to the 1970s red-brick city, and on to the Li Ka Shing Tower (2001) and the Jockey Club Innovation Tower (2014) — is already set out in detail in Iconic Buildings and Landmarks and Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Maze Campus; it is not recapitulated here.

One common misunderstanding that needs clearing up: the famous red brick of the Hung Hom campus has no direct architectural inheritance from the 1936 “Red Brick House” in Wan Chai. The two are separated by about forty years and belong to entirely different design teams and architectural languages — the Wan Chai building was a pre-war Victorian brick block; the Hung Hom red-brick city is a modern 1970s campus that borrows the imagery of the Anglo-American “red brick university”. What they share is only the material imagery of red brick and the school’s consistent identification with an engineering and applied tradition. To present Hung Hom’s red brick as a “continuation” of the Wan Chai Red Brick House is a romantic tale unsupported by evidence; this piece leaves it at that.

Source strength: The planning of the first red-brick phase by Kinoshita/Palmer & Turner after 1972, and its completion around 1976, are drawn from existing campus architectural research (PolyU’s official publication Excel@PolyU and Zolima CityMag, as detailed in the two cross-referenced files); this section is only a bridging passage and does not repeat that research.

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