rotten row

There is a thoroughfare in central London known as Rotten Row. With a name like that, you might think that it runs through a slum area, but you would be mistaken. ‘Rotten Row’ is a corruption of route du roi (‘way of the king’) and reflects a time when French was the language of the royal court in England. However, there is a location that I pass through almost every day here in Hong Kong that I identify mentally as ‘rotten row’ (no capitals), and it really is rotten. What follows is a description.

Whenever I want to go into Fanling from the village where I live, either for shopping or for something to eat, I follow a narrow concrete path across an area that was extensively cultivated when we moved to our present house in 2008. However, most of these fields were fenced off by the landowner—Henderson Land, one of the largest property developers in Hong Kong—in 2011, and there is now no evidence of their previous use apart from banana ‘trees’, which have somehow survived the encroaching vegetation, although they no longer appear to bear any fruit. This is a photo that I originally used in Hong Kong Country, a survey in pictures of this area that I posted in January 2010:

The high-rise blocks mark the eastern edge of Fanling, but this view no longer exists.

When the various cultivated areas were fenced off in 2011, Henderson’s employees also demolished all the unoccupied habitable structures in the area, including Koon Garden and the house of Lee Ming Sang, photos of which I included in my original survey.

However, if I’m walking into Fanling from my house, shortly after leaving the village and crossing the Ma Wat River, I pass in front of a row of ramshackle ‘houses’, all of which were occupied in 2008. My original survey also included a photo of the first of these.

When walking from Fanling, this is a view of the start of the row:

The land on the right wasn’t being farmed, but it was fenced off anyway, presumably to prevent subsequent occupation by squatters.

And this is a closer look at the first house:

The red graffiti are now almost illegible, but they were painted by the last occupant of the house, who was lamenting the fact that he’d just been evicted! The walls are a single brick thick, the walls subsequently being rendered. This doesn’t sound particularly substantial, but this building is more robust than some others in the row.

The door has now been securely padlocked, as you can see in this photo:

I believe that the rather cryptic writing you can see to the left of the door was painted by a government agency, possibly the Housing Authority, to indicate that the occupant has been rehoused, although it probably doesn’t refer to the last occupant.

And this is the next house:

This house also appears to be quite robust—apart from the door, which is made of wood and could easily be infested with termites now. The padlock here is quite flimsy, and it would probably be quite easy to force a way in, should someone want to re-occupy it.

The next photo shows something that is surprisingly common—an enclosed ‘porch’ that is effectively a cage:

The frames of bars at each end of this house appear to be there to stop anyone trying to pass between the house and its neighbours.

The next house also has a caged porch:

…and I’ve no idea what this bed frame is doing on the roof:

The fifth house was the last in the row to be occupied—by an old woman. I don’t know whether she died, or has been rehoused elsewhere:

If you look closely, you will see that—like the previous two houses—the entrance to this house has been securely chained and padlocked. This house also includes the extended section beyond the cage, making it the largest in the row by floor area.

And this is the final house in the row:

This photo was taken looking back towards the rest of the row. All the windows in these houses are old-fashioned metal-framed casement windows, and in all but one case, the glass is still intact. However, one pane has been broken in this house, so I reached in with my camera, hopefully to get an idea of what it looks like inside. This was the result:

The calendar is open at May 2017, which is probably when the last occupant left—or was evicted.

Around that time, writing appeared on the footpath, purportedly by the ‘landlord’ of these premises, that announced the imminent closure of the footpath. My reaction at the time? I’d like to see him try! I should point out that there are streetlights along this path, and I've always interpreted the existence of streetlights as indicating a public right of way! Of course, there is an alternative route to the shops from the village, but it’s twice as long, and I’m not about to take it with a rucksack full of beer, although I might do so if I merely felt like a longer walk. I imagine that my fellow villagers would have had similar feelings—minus the beer—although the threat of closure seems to have gone, and I was never aware of any protest that might have been planned.

Incidentally, I wrote ‘landlord’ instead of ‘landowner’ because I can’t imagine that the skullduggery I’ve been describing here has anything to do with Henderson Land. If it had been, then rotten row would have been demolished by now, to prevent re-occupation, and it hasn’t been. I continue to wonder why.