Streets

Streets: Exploring Kowloon is a guidebook with a difference: through explorations of Kowloon it illustrates aspects of Hong Kong’s history, culture, society and heritage in ways not covered in standard works, and guides the reader into areas few locals, let alone visitors, go. It is the ideal book for the person who wishes to see a different, more authentic and gritty Hong Kong than that of the usual guidebooks and tours. The book starts with a district familiar to all visitors— Tsim Sha Tsui—but then moves into the hinterland of Kowloon, taking the reader and walker far beyond the well-known streets of tourist-oriented shops and hotels. Streets: Exploring Kowloon, like its companion, Streets: Exploring Hong Kong Island, guides the reader with maps and travel information to take 45 walks throughout Kowloon, each along a specific street pointing out historically and culturally important sites, but also the curious and the intriguing. While accessible to readers new to Hong Kong and offering them a very different side of the place to the shopping-focused tourist traps or the glass-and-steel glitz of Central, it also offers much that is new and unknown to frequent visitors and residents.

Jason Wordie is a local historian and long-time resident of Hong Kong. A graduate of the University of Hong Kong, he has written extensively on the history and culture of Hong Kong. He lives in the New Territories. The outstanding photographs in this book are taken by two of Hong Kong’s notable photographers, Anthony J. Hedley and John Lambon.

“Everyday backstreet life, the sights, sounds, smells and flavours so accurately documented in Streets: Exploring Kowloon—our city’s authentic life—remain fundamentally the same as that I first experienced, enjoyed and came to know as a young man in the 1950s. I hope you will enjoy exploring Kowloon as much as I have.” —Felix Bieger, former General Manager, The Peninsula