It’s 10 pm on Sneakers Street and the shops are full to bursting. It seems like half of Hong Kong is here, scouring the shelves and rummaging through displays for Nike, Adidas, limited edition and new-in-stock.
Among aficionados, the rubber soles of Sneakers Street have legendary status. Located in the district of Mong Kok, Sneakers Street is home to more than 50 retail outlets – all of them selling sports shoes, and all of them conducting a roaring, raucous trade.
‘Every day is like this,’ says Michael, our guide, raising his voice above the clamour.
When not conducting tours for friends, Michael is a photographer, documenting the crowds and urban density in his native Hong Kong. For the past 10 years, his base has been in Mong Kok, one of the most populous areas anywhere on Earth: 340,000 souls for every square mile, at last count.
With demographics on that scale, the only way is up. Hong Kong ranks in the top spot of the world’s skyscraper league, boasting more high rises than any of its international counterparts: around 320 of its buildings stand 490 feet or taller (New York is next with 257 skyscrapers, followed by Dubai).
A tall building in one place looks pretty much the same as a tall building in almost any other. The difference with Hong Kong’s tall buildings lies in their utility, where three quarters of them are used as housing stock, and where the pace of their assembly takes place at a staggering speed.
Hong Kong’s construction boom began in the late 1990s, peaking in 2003 when 56 skyscrapers reached completion in a single year. There have been steady annual additions made to the skyline ever since – a trend unlikely to slow down anytime soon. In fact, to live here is to feel the earth move on a daily basis. When we flew in, landing early morning, our hotel room was several hours from being ready to check into. Jet-lagged, still on London time, we waited it out in the hotel bar, ordering a bottle of red just as the bar stools beneath us started to shake.
‘The fuck? Did you feel that?’
We learned from the bar man that everybody feels that—the pound of the pile driver, slamming steel girders into bedrock, six days out of every seven. For those who live here, the location of the pile driver is an important factor in deciding where to live; rental leases closest to its boom and pound are generally avoided.
In Mong Kok the skyscrapers all come spindly thin and are stacked back to back like giant, concrete dominoes. In this most populous part of Hong Kong, there are such things that exist called ‘cage homes’, where residents – usually male, often destitute – rent single beds inside a cage, with several cages to a room.
At the same time, Hong Kong’s housing market is one of the most expensive in the world. Rising rents have just forced Michael out of Mong Kok and into a photography studio further north, into the New Territories, where real estate is more affordable and the pace far less intense. The move has also allowed him to move into an apartment that has a second bedroom, which comes in useful now that both his daughters are starting to get big.
To get to Mong Kok, we’d taken the Star Ferry across from Hong Kong Island where we’d spent the past few days climbing the steep streets of Soho to peer into the art galleries and fashionable boutiques, then following the smell of incense to the temples of Sheung Wan.
The upper deck of the ferry is the best place to see the Hong Kong skyline. We watched from the back of the boat as the glittering towers of the financial district receded behind us, before stepping off onto the mainland, into Kowloon, where statues of two bronze-cast ‘comfort women’ greeted us. These same statues have been cropping up all over Hong Kong of late – outside the Japanese consulate, most controversially – where protestors have placed them to serve as a reminder of war crimes that still go unacknowledged.
From Kowloon pier, it was a short journey on the MTR to Mong Kok East, where we joined the commuters in queuing along the platform to board the busy trains.
Michael met us at the subway exit, whisking us off for a traditional Chinese dessert where the waitress brought us picture menus so we could point to what we wanted.
‘In Hong Kong, going out for dessert after dinner is like going to the pub in England,’ Michael said, as we decided on a sweet, orange-colored soup made from lotus seeds, and another with red beans that came served with squares of black, herbal jelly, and our favorites, the sweet rice dumplings filled with sesame seeds and sprinkled with chopped peanuts.
Taking us shopping next, Michael led us through the crowded lanes of Ladies’ Market with its big, colorful explosion of tourist trinkets, t-shirts and high-end designer fakes. The noise of the market was cacophonous, the experience hands-on – more than once we were asked to move by a quick push or a jab.
‘If you want to buy anything,’ said Michael, calling back over his shoulder, ‘you should probably leave the haggling to me.’
At the edges of the market, the air was dense with cooking smells from food booths selling spicy tofu, fried fish balls and octopus tentacles twined around wooden skewers, at least a foot in length. Above us, the high rises crowd the sky and clothes dry from racks affixed to the outside of every window (when space inside is limited, where to hang the clothes?).
We round the corner into Fa Yuen Street – to give Sneakers Street its proper name – where Michael pointed to a sleek, black sportswear mall with chrome fittings and polished floors, ‘Soon, every shop will look like this,’ he tells us.
These are the last days of Sneakers Street. As part of the modernization of Mong Kok, the thoroughfare is scheduled to be razed soon, and Sneaker Street 2.0 is due to take its place.
Gone will be the 80s facades and the kitsch Chinese characters hanging perilously above our heads in multi-colored neon. Gone too will be the tower blocks with rounded corners and good Feng Shui, to be replaced by ones with sharper angles that reach up to the moon and stretch far into the future.
Behind the street, we see a bank of new builds surrounded in a lattice of traditional bamboo scaffolding that somehow looks incongruous, as if a place so focussed on its progress should rely on methods transported from the past.
Michael holds his arms out as if to embrace the whole of Sneakers street. ‘The next time you visit here?’ he says, and brushes his hands together, ‘All of this, demolished. Gone.’
