Clock Tower from Blake Pier

Clock Tower from Blake Pier

HK: Central - Clock Tower (near Peddar Street)

Hong Kong’s first clock tower was built on Pedder Street in 1862. Situated in the centre of the young City of Victoria, it was a square granite structure about 80 feet high. Besides telling the time — though the legendary Scottish photographer John Thomson remarked that the clock was “liable to fits of indisposition” because of the heat — it supported a fire bell, and the clock’s dial glowed at night to guide boats in the harbour. According to The Tourist’s Guide to Hong Kong, with Short Trips to the Mainland of China, published in 1897, it “may be considered as the best landmark in the colony.”

Yet, for many Hong Kong residents, the Pedder Street clock tower was a town planning abomination. Built with a donation from the Scotsman Douglas Lapraik, the 19th-century shipping taipan who was once an apprentice watchmaker in Macau, the landmark stood awkwardly in the middle of the junction of Pedder Street and Queen’s Road. It eventually became a serious obstruction to traffic, sparking decades of agitation from the business community to demolish the tower, which was finally pulled down in 1913.

In an age when watches were a luxury available to the wealthy few, public clocks were important for people to regulate their affairs and to be punctual. When the Gloucester Building — the precursor to The Landmark — rose in 1932, a stub of a clock tower was added, somewhat as an afterthought in visual terms, to the corner of the colonnaded structure that overlooked Des Voeux Road and Pedder Street.

Hong Kong Pictorial Postcard co.

1900s

Postcard