From Wood Road, Wan Chai to Hung Hom: Three Site Moves and the 1957 Inauguration of the Hung Hom Campus

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

A three-storey red-brick building completed in 1936; a stretch of land reclaimed from Victoria Harbour; a campus built over the former sites of a barracks and a railway depot — PolyU is casually known by locals as "Hung Hom Poly", but beneath those two characters lies a spatial history of land that was filled, buildings that were demolished, and sites that were redeveloped again and again. This article does not retell the institutional story of "why the school was founded in 1937" (that thread runs through the companion piece in this same module). Instead, it trains the lens on the buildings themselves: what each of the two generations of campus looked like, what ground they stood on, and where the bricks went after the school moved away.

This article offers a spatial/architectural deep-read; the institutional perspective (pre-founding history, renaming, educational positioning) is covered separately in founding-and-early-campus.md, the full chronology in history.md, and the red-brick building cluster of the 1970s Hung Hom campus in Signature Buildings and Landmarks. To avoid repetition, the background of the Chinese Manufacturers' Association donation and of Governor Sir Alexander Grantham is kept brief here; for details, see the two preceding articles.

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# What manner of building was the "Red Brick House" on Wood Road, Wan Chai?

PolyU's first campus was not in Hung Hom at all, but a red-brick building in Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island. According to the architectural records on Gwulo: Old Hong Kong^※, the building was completed on 29 August 1936 — three storeys, built in red brick, so nicknamed "Red Brick House" after its façade, standing on Wood Road, Wan Chai. It is "older" than the school itself: the building came first, the institution moved in later.

This Red Brick House was the first "red-brick building" in PolyU's bloodline. The famous red-brick campus of Hung Hom would not appear until the 1970s — a gap of roughly forty years and a whole Victoria Harbour. What ties the two together is the same school's almost fateful attachment to brick as a material (for the design logic of the Hung Hom red brick, see Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Maze Campus).

After the Government Trade School moved into the Red Brick House, classes began at once. According to the same archive, the school's first course, Wireless Telegraphy, opened in February 1937; the formal inauguration ceremony did not come until 13 April 1938, performed by then-Governor Sir Geoffry Northcote. In other words, "founded 1937" refers to the start of teaching, "opened 1938" to the ceremony — two dates, both true of the same red-brick building, depending on which yardstick you use.

According to PolyU's official 85th-anniversary history^※, the school on Wood Road, Wan Chai, was Hong Kong's "first publicly funded, post-secondary technical institution in Hong Kong". This triple identity — first, publicly funded, post-secondary — is the fundamental reason PolyU anchors its institutional origins in the Wan Chai Red Brick House rather than the later Hung Hom campus.

Source strength: the completion date of 29 August 1936, three-storey red brick, the first class of February 1937, and Northcote's opening ceremony of 13 April 1938 all come from Gwulo: Old Hong Kong; the "first publicly funded post-secondary technical institution" designation comes from PolyU's official institutional history — a primary official source.

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# Why was Wood Road, Wan Chai the starting point?

Placing an industrial school's first campus on Wood Road, Wan Chai was no afterthought. By the 1930s, Wan Chai had grown into a de facto cluster of technical and vocational education on Hong Kong Island — from this red-brick building to the later Morrison Hill Technical Institute in the same district, to the buildings on Oi Kwan Road used by the Vocational Training Council, the Wan Chai/Morrison Hill area remained tied to the phrase "technical education" for half a century. PolyU's first campus was planted here precisely because this was an existing node on the island's technical-education map.

According to Gwulo: Old Hong Kong^※, the successors that took over the Red Brick House after PolyU's predecessor had long occupied it — the "Victoria Technical School" and the "Morrison Hill Technical Institute" — also belonged to the technical/industrial education system. In other words, the building's tenants changed again and again, but the "vocational education" character of the Wood Road site held almost without interruption: for half a century, this red-brick house remained the home of the same species of school.

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 documented in the same Gwulo file; "island land scarcity drove the relocation" is a reasonable inference from the scale expansion and the fact of the move, marked as an orientational observation.

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# After the school left, what became of the Wan Chai Red Brick House?

This is a stretch that established institutional histories generally skip — campus histories tend to stop dead at "moved to Hung Hom in 1957", as if the Wan Chai building had simply vanished. Not so: after the main body of the school departed, the Red Brick House lived on independently for a full thirty more years.

According to the Gwulo file^※, the Hong Kong Technical College had, since 1947, also housed a "Junior Technical College" within the Wan Chai Red Brick House. When the main college moved to Hung Hom in 1957, the junior division did not follow. It stayed put, was renamed the "Victoria Technical School", and took over the entire red-brick building. In other words, the Red Brick House changed tenants but not purpose — it remained an industrial/technical school.

The building changed hands again afterwards. According to the same file, from roughly 1981 to 1988 it served as an annexe to the Morrison Hill Technical Institute. Finally, on 31 December 1988, it was demolished; the neighbouring "high block" on Oi Kwan Road, used by the Vocational Training Council, was preserved. Today the Wood Road area bears the face of the VTC and post-urban-renewal development; the three-storey red-brick house that witnessed PolyU's beginnings survives only in archive photographs.

Source strength: the Junior Technical College (1947), the renaming as Victoria Technical School (post-1957), the Morrison Hill annexe (c. 1981–1988), and the demolition of 31 December 1988 all come from the same Gwulo entry — a continuous account from a single archival source, so "cross-corroborated" would be too strong; it is best labelled a single-source narrative.

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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 an industrial college expanding rapidly after the war. According to PolyU's official history^※, after the Second World War the school was renamed the Hong Kong Technical College, and its courses and student numbers swelled alongside the take-off of Hong Kong's manufacturing industry. The old building on Wood Road grew increasingly cramped, and relocation became inevitable. The official history frames 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 made this "new chapter" land was a key donation from the business community. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, in 1956 the Chinese Manufacturers' Association of Hong Kong donated one million dollars to the school, and with "government funding and the allocation of land", construction of the new campus on the Hung Hom Bay reclamation could begin. The full story of how donation, public money and land came together — including the purchasing power of that million-dollar gift in the 1950s and the background of Grantham's governorship — is told in detail in founding-and-early-campus.md, and will not be repeated here. This article asks a different question: what was the history of the land at Hung Hom that was chosen?

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

The new campus was not built on empty ground but on reclaimed land and the former sites of existing facilities. This is the most easily overlooked — and most intriguing — layer of PolyU's spatial history: the ground where students attend classes, commute and take graduation photos today was still under the sea little more than a century ago; and once the sea was filled, the land had already been claimed first by the military and the railways.

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

In other words, today's Hung Hom campus sits atop the former sites of at least an old railway station, a barracks, and a railway depot. According to the same account, the Austin Road/Chatham Road junction (around Block A today) was once the site of the old Hung Hom station; and the campus land itself takes in the former Chatham Road barracks and the former Kowloon-Canton Railway Ho Man Tin depot. These facilities were successively vacated and levelled before they could be pieced together into a single campus broad enough for an industrial college to plan and expand upon.

Stacked together, these three prior identities are a miniature of Hung Hom's urban role in the first half of the twentieth century: first the railways (the old Hung Hom station and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot), then the military (the Chatham Road barracks), and finally reclamation filling the waterfront into whole blocks amenable to large-scale planning. That an industrial college should end up on these layered former sites is, in a sense, "industrial-era Hung Hom" ceding a piece of its own land to the school that trained industry's workforce. And precisely because the land was freshly reclaimed and gathered several large parcels that could be vacated in one piece, the Hung Hom site enjoyed what the cramped Wan Chai building never had — ample hinterland, extensible again and again, which left room for the 1970s red-brick building cluster and the continued additions that followed.

Source strength: the Hung Hom Bay reclamation, the old Hung Hom station (around today's Block A), the Chatham Road barracks and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot all come from the campus-history section of Chinese Wikipedia — a secondary account, marked "cross-corroborated", with precise site boundaries still awaiting confirmation from earlier land records.

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# What did the new Hung Hom campus look like at first?

Walking into PolyU today, the eye is met by the red-brick cluster of the post-1970s and Zaha Hadid's curvilinear Innovation Tower of 2014 — none of these is the original form of the 1957 campus. On completion in 1957, the Hung Hom campus was a typical set of 1950s Hong Kong government modernist buildings: masonry structure, low and wide, functionalist.

According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, the Technical College's original buildings and facilities at Hung Hom included the following:

This configuration — a main block (Foundation Building), an assembly hall (Keswick Hall), workshops and laboratories, a hostel, a car park, and a sports ground — spells out an industrial college's spatial priorities: practical training space (workshops and laboratories) and ceremonial space (the hall) weighed equally, with residential and sports provision complete. According to Gwulo: Old Hong Kong^※, Keswick Hall is identified in early photographs as one of the original 1950s buildings — one of the few individual structures of that "first generation" of Hung Hom architecture to survive in clear photographic record.

A note of caution: certain early machine-translated materials mangled these building names beyond recognition (rendering the hall as "Jockey Hall", the workshops as some "Complex Factory", and so on). This article follows the original wording of Chinese Wikipedia ("Foundation Building / Keswick Hall / workshops and laboratories") and Gwulo's English labelling of "Keswick Hall", and does not adopt mistranslations of unknown provenance.

Source strength: the list of Foundation Building, Keswick Hall, workshops and laboratories, hostel, car park and sports ground comes from Chinese Wikipedia; Keswick Hall as an original 1950s building is additionally confirmed by early photograph captions on Gwulo — the two sources corroborate each other.

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

Everyone can say "1957", but pin down "which day" and a small discrepancy between sources emerges that is worth setting side by side.

According to Gwulo: Old Hong Kong^※, Sir Alexander Grantham laid the foundation stone for the new Hung Hom campus in 1956, and the campus was completed and came into use around December 1957. According to Chinese Wikipedia^※, the exact date of the inauguration was 2 December 1957, performed by Governor Sir Alexander Grantham. And according to English Wikipedia^※ with Gwulo's supplementary note, the school had in fact already begun classes at the new campus in November 1957.

Lay the three threads side by side and the time sequence is clear:

In other words, "classes" came before the "inauguration" — staff and students had been teaching at the new Hung Hom site since November 1957, and the Governor's ceremonial opening followed a month later on 2 December. This mirrors the Wan Chai Red Brick House precedent of "classes in February 1937, opening in April 1938": classes mark actual operation, openings mark ritual completion. Both dates are right; they just answer different questions.

Worth noting, too: the inauguration of 2 December 1957 was among the last official acts of Grantham's tenure — he stepped down as Governor at the end of 1957 (for his exact term and biography, see founding-and-early-campus.md). The opening of the Hung Hom campus fell, by coincidence, at the very close of his ten years in office.

Source strength: the 1956 foundation stone comes from Gwulo; the 2 December 1957 inauguration from Chinese Wikipedia; the November 1957 start of classes from English Wikipedia and Gwulo. The three do not conflict — they correspond respectively to the foundation-stone, first-teaching and inauguration stages — so the overall reliability is "cross-corroborated".

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# Two campuses side by side: a table to see at a glance what changed

Setting the Wan Chai Red Brick House against the new Hung Hom campus, the meaning of the 1957 move becomes obvious at a glance:

The most striking row in this table is "years of use": the Wan Chai campus served PolyU's predecessor for only about twenty years; the Hung Hom campus has been in use to this day, for over sixty. From Hong Kong Island to Kowloon, from a Victorian-era brick building to a modernist campus on reclaimed land, the move of 1957 was not merely a change of address — it shifted the school's physical centre of gravity decisively from the island to Kowloon. The popular image of "Hung Hom Poly" began to set, precisely, with this new campus of that year.

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# What do people most often ask about the relocation?

A few questions recur around this stretch of PolyU history, and are just as often misremembered. Each answer below can be quoted on its own.

Q: Was PolyU in Hung Hom from the very start? No. When the school was founded in 1937 its premises were in a three-storey red-brick building on Wood Road, Wan Chai, on Hong Kong Island, and it did not move to Hung Hom, Kowloon until 1957. For the first twenty years or so of its history, PolyU's coordinates were Wan Chai, not Hung Hom (per PolyU's official history^※).

Q: Is the "Red Brick House" in Wan Chai still standing? No. According to the Gwulo file^※, after the school moved out in 1957 the 1936 building served successively as the Victoria Technical School and an annexe of the Morrison Hill Technical Institute, until it 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 line of descent. The two are separated by roughly four decades and belong to entirely different design teams and architectural vocabularies: Wan Chai was a pre-war Victorian brick building; Hung Hom is a 1970s modern campus borrowing the imagery of the British and American "red brick universities". What they share is only the red-brick image and the engineering tradition.

Q: On which day exactly was the Hung Hom campus inaugurated? The foundation stone was laid in 1956 (by Grantham); students had already moved in and begun classes in November 1957; and the Governor's inauguration ceremony was held on 2 December 1957 (respectively per Gwulo^※, English Wikipedia, and Chinese Wikipedia^※). "First classes" and "inauguration" are two different yardsticks; there is no need to choose between them.

Q: Was the Hung Hom site virgin land before the campus? No. It was reclaimed land in Hung Hom Bay, and layered over the former sites of the old Hung Hom station, the Chatham Road barracks and the KCR Ho Man Tin depot (per Chinese Wikipedia) — urban land first used by the military and the railways, then vacated and consolidated.

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# How did the new Hung Hom campus grow into today's "red-brick town"?

The low-rise modernist complex of 1957 is not the look of today's PolyU red-brick campus. After coming into use, the Hung Hom site went through decades of "growth in place".

According to existing campus-architecture research, the red-brick keynote of today's Hung Hom campus was established only with the first-phase development planned around the 1972 establishment of the Hong Kong Polytechnic, by the Palmer & Turner team led by architect James Kinoshita; the first phase of the red-brick building cluster was completed around 1976, built on former godown land — fixing the "red brick plus elevated podium" campus vocabulary from then on. This architectural generational line, from the 1957 modernist campus to the 1970s red-brick town to the Li Ka Shing Tower of 2001 and the Jockey Club Innovation Tower of 2014, is told in full in Signature Buildings and Landmarks and Red Brick, Lettered Cores and the Maze Campus; it will not be repeated here.

One common misconception worth clearing up: the famous red brick of the Hung Hom campus has no direct architectural descent from the 1936 "Red Brick House" in Wan Chai. The two are some forty years apart and belong to wholly different design teams and vocabularies — the Wan Chai house was a pre-war Victorian brick building; the Hung Hom red-brick town is a 1970s modern campus channelling the imagery of the British and American "red brick universities". All they share is the material image of red brick, and the same school's consistent identification with its engineering and applied tradition. To call Hung Hom's red brick a "continuation" of the Wan Chai Red Brick House is an appealing story with no evidence behind it; this article declines to repeat it as fact.

Source strength: the post-1972 first-phase red-brick planning under James Kinoshita/Palmer & Turner and the c. 1976 completion of the first phase come from existing campus-architecture research (PolyU's official publication Excel@PolyU and Zolima CityMag, as detailed in the two cross-referenced articles); this section serves only as a bridge and does not repeat their research.

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