When Colonial Concrete Burns: The Hong Kong Fire and the Housing Reality Britain Left Behind

One housing estate in Tai Po, eight towers packed together like a row of book spines, wrapped in plastic netting and bamboo. A renovation fire starts, rides the scaffold, and within minutes an entire concrete village is alight. By the time the flames are out, at least one hundred and twenty eight people are dead and hundreds more are injured or missing. Families search community centre noticeboards for faces in printed photographs. Fire alarms never sounded. Elderly residents woke up not to sirens but to smoke punching through their doors.

Western newspapers describe this as a modern tragedy in an ageing city, powered by greedy local contractors and lax supervision. They compare it to Grenfell. They quote experts on plastic netting and foam boards. They ask whether the current administration will survive the outrage. What they almost never ask is the question that matters most.

Why, in one of the richest cities on the planet, were thousands of older people still living in a nineteen eighties concrete warren built on a colonial revenue system that was never dismantled, while the median resident of Shanghai, Beijing or Nanning now lives with roughly double the indoor space and a far lower chance of burning alive in a tower renovation gone wrong.

The skyline that Britain built

To understand why this fire is not an accident but a structural event, you have to start with the way Britain built Hong Kong’s political economy. The territory was never governed as a democracy in any meaningful sense. The governor was appointed in London, not elected in Kowloon. The Executive Council and Legislative Council were, for most of the colonial period, advisory clubs of civil servants and commercial notables. Ordinary Chinese residents, including the hundreds of thousands of refugees who flooded in after nineteen forty nine, had no route to vote out the people who set the rules that confined them to flammable hillsides and overcrowded estates.

From the early twentieth century onward, the colonial government discovered something that suited both the Treasury and its business allies. If the state kept tight control of land supply, auctioned plots on lease, and charged heavy premiums when leases were modified for redevelopment, it could fund a large part of its budget without raising income tax or corporate tax. Land receipts and related charges would do the work.

By the late colonial period, a large share of government revenue in some years came from land connected sources. The model was simple. Release land slowly. Maintain scarcity. Use the proceeds to fund administration. The consequence was equally simple. Only a small circle of developers, backed by plenty of capital and credit, could play the game at any scale. The interests of the state and the interests of this circle converged.

In this structure, cheap and abundant land for ordinary housing was not a policy goal. It was a threat. If you flood the market with new sites, values fall, premiums fall, and the state’s easy revenue shrinks. In any serious democracy, that trade off would at least be debated in public. In colonial Hong Kong it was settled inside the governor’s office and a handful of boardrooms.

Fires as the price of order

The Hong Kong that Britain left behind was not just a financial centre and a container port. It was also a maze of squatter camps, tenements and high density resettlement estates. After the Second World War, refugees from civil war and revolution on the mainland poured across the border. Many ended up building their own shelters on slopes and hillsides of Kowloon and the New Territories, out of timber, tin and scrap.

Officials knew these settlements were fire traps. The files from the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties show dozens of hillside fires every year. The Shek Kip Mei fire of nineteen fifty three, which destroyed a squatter town and left more than fifty thousand people homeless, was the one that forced the outside world to notice, but there were many others. Entire districts were levelled in a night, then cleared and rebuilt as hard edged concrete estates with minimal facilities.

Those resettlement estates were described as a social achievement. There is a different way to read them. They were a cheap way to stabilise the labour force while preserving the land revenue model. Refugees and workers were moved from wooden shacks into one room units in tall blocks with shared toilets and little privacy. The estates were squeezed into what land could be freed without disturbing the property business. Space per person was kept low, and the new blocks were grouped tightly to conserve every square metre of saleable development land elsewhere.

Look at archival photographs of Hong Kong in the nineteen sixties. In the same frame you see modern apartment towers and hillside slums. The men who ran the colony lived in detached houses with gardens on the Peak or in roomy flats on the Mid Levels. The workers who made the colony profitable lived below them in stacked concrete cells or in shacks wedged between boulders. Call it the one in a thousand city. The top fraction lived well. The majority lived in conditions that would have been scandalous in Britain itself.

The dictatorship nobody calls a dictatorship

Western commentary likes to present the story of Hong Kong as a fall from democratic grace. In the standard version, the city once enjoyed liberal institutions and has since been dragged downward. The truth is less flattering to Britain. For most of its history, Hong Kong was an executive dictatorship with commercial consultation. Rule of law existed for contracts and commercial disputes. Political rights for the majority did not.

There were no free elections for governor. There was no universal suffrage for the legislature. When limited elections were finally introduced in the nineteen eighties, they were designed through functional constituencies that gave outsized voice to professional and business sectors. The people who lived in squatter camps in the nineteen fifties or in resettlement blocks in the nineteen sixties had almost no institutional leverage over housing, land or planning policy.

The point is not simply moral. It is causal. When voters cannot punish a government for crowding them into flammable estates while protecting obscenely wealthy landlord families, a certain pattern repeats. Fires happen. Commissions investigate. A few technical adjustments are made. The underlying machine rolls on.

What most people in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning now live in

At this point the London reader is conditioned to reach for a lazy dodge. Yes, Hong Kong is unequal, they might say, but China is hardly a model of decent housing either. This is where the numbers are useful, because they demolish that reflex.

By the end of twenty twenty three, official figures from Beijing report that the average per capita floor space for urban residents across China has passed forty square metres. Earlier National Bureau of Statistics releases already had the figure close to the high thirties by the middle of the last decade. These are national averages, not showpiece districts. They include cities far poorer than Shanghai and Beijing.

City level data for the capital and the main coastal metropolis tell the same story in more detail. In Beijing, per capita urban residential floor area now sits in the middle thirties. In Shanghai, it is in the high thirties. These numbers have been climbing steadily for two decades. They are not perfect comfort. They are not suburban sprawl. They are simply what a modern middle income country considers basic urban dignity.

Home ownership is where the contrast becomes even sharper. Survey work and central bank data suggest that more than eight in ten urban households in China live in homes they own. In some studies the urban ownership rate approaches the mid nineties in percentage terms. Ownership does not mean luxury. It does mean security. The median Shanghai or Beijing family has a claim on a flat that offers several rooms and thirty to forty square metres per person, with formal tenure and national building codes for fire protection.

Nanning, a regional capital in Guangxi that outsiders rarely mention, fits this pattern. Provincial statistics place similar cities in the thirty to forty square metre range per urban resident. New districts are made up of mid rise and high rise concrete blocks built to national code, with separation distances and fire compartments that make a Tai Po style multi tower cascade far less likely. Fires occur, as they do everywhere, but the typical family is not sleeping in a compartment carved out of someone else’s living room with a plywood wall and a single shared exit.

What the median Hongkonger is allowed to have

Now set that beside Hong Kong’s official numbers. The twenty twenty one Population Census records a median per capita floor area of accommodation for domestic households of sixteen square metres. That is the typical space per person across the city. The median total floor area per household is about forty square metres, which gives you a standard mental picture. A family of two or three in a small flat, possibly adequate but not generous.

Then drop into the underclass that British land policy created and that Beijing inherited. Research for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council notes that while the median is sixteen square metres per person, residents in subdivided flats often have barely six or seven square metres to themselves. Activist surveys of subdivided units in older districts report average space per person closer to fifty square feet, barely more than a prison bunk in some jurisdictions. Photographs of coffin homes in Mong Kok and Sham Shui Po show plywood boxes stacked in twos and threes, with thirty people sharing a single flat.

This is not a comparison of horrible with horrible. It is a comparison of a city that has made basic indoor space and formal tenure the norm for most residents, and a city that still treats many of its workers and elderly as lodgers in someone else’s asset. China has many problems. Hong Kong’s housing model is specific, and it is colonial in origin.

The Tai Po fire as a late colonial event

Once you put these pieces in place, the recent fire at Wang Fuk Court in Tai Po stops looking like a mysterious outbreak of negligence and begins to look like exactly what you would expect when a property state grows old.

The estate is a government subsidised home ownership scheme from the nineteen eighties. Thousands of households bought their flats there decades ago when prices were still within reach of the lower middle class. Many residents are now retired, living on modest savings and pensions in ageing concrete towers that were never designed with twenty first century fire loads in mind.

To renovate the exterior, the management committee and its chosen contractors wrapped the buildings in bamboo scaffolding and plastic safety netting. Foam boards were fitted over windows to protect the glass and contain dust. The result was a continuous and flammable second skin around each tower. When fire broke out on one building, this skin turned into a vertical fuse. Flames raced up and across, from block to block, faster than elderly residents could react, especially in flats where the foam blocked the view outside.

Western reports obsess over the contractor. They tell us that company directors have been arrested, that the Independent Commission Against Corruption has opened an inquiry, that the government has promised hundreds of millions of Hong Kong dollars in relief funds. They linger on the fact that no alarms sounded and that the buildings were in the midst of renovation. All of that is true. None of it explains why the disaster scale was so large.

The real answer sits one level up. The Wang Fuk Court layout is classic late colonial Hong Kong. Multiple tall blocks on a tight footprint, minimal separation, standardised units, and only as much communal space as would fit around the saleable floor area. The overwhelming majority of residents had no realistic way to move out to larger and safer homes in their old age. Property prices in Hong Kong over the last two decades outran incomes so aggressively that even owners of subsidised flats were locked in place. If they sold, they could not buy again.

In that sense, this fire was not an aberration but a structural inevitability. Take a colonial land model that prices land as a luxury good. Lock it into a constitutional promise. Build estates for workers and lower middle income households at densities that would be politically impossible in Britain. Fail to retrofit those estates for modern fire loads because it would cost too much and disrupt too many units. Then drape plastic and foam over the exterior to save on containment costs during renovation. Wait long enough, and you do not have an accident. You have a scheduled event.

The Western script that must not be trusted

Why does the Western press insist on treating this as an almost domestic scandal, a story about one set of contractors and one local government, instead of what it plainly is, a story about a colonial political economy that London built and Beijing preserved. Part of the answer is psychological. It is more comfortable in Knightsbridge and Kensington to believe that British rule left behind a model city that has since been spoiled by others, than to acknowledge that the fire in Tai Po is burning through British concrete.

Look closely at the language in the typical broadsheet. The city is described as densely packed as if that density were a cultural choice. The estate is described as old housing as if old age were the problem rather than design. Corruption and negligence are framed as present tense flaws. The high rise fire becomes one more warning about China’s governance, even though the land model, the estate layout and the original decision to treat housing as an instrument of fiscal policy were all made under the Union Flag.

There is another quiet trick. The comparison that Western coverage prefers is not Hong Kong versus Shanghai or Nanning. It is Hong Kong versus London. Reporters leap straight to Grenfell. They set twenty seventeen against twenty twenty five and ask whether Hong Kong has learnt London’s lessons. They rarely ask why, half a century after Shek Kip Mei, Hong Kong still had thousands of elderly people living in a complex where a facade fire could jump from tower to tower, while mainland cities have, in the meantime, redesigned their building codes and pushed per capita floor area into the thirties and forties.

Once you shift the comparison, the narrative reverses. You stop asking why China cannot match Hong Kong’s supposed modernity. You start asking why a supposedly world class financial centre governed by Britain for more than a century has left so many people living in conditions that would be considered unacceptable in the very mainland cities that Western commentary likes to caricature.

A tale of two models

None of this is an argument that China’s own system is humane or that its cities are free of tragedy. The country has had its share of deadly fires, industrial accidents and shoddy construction. It is, however, a simple factual observation that for the majority of urban residents, especially in cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning, basic living space and tenure security have improved to levels far above what Hong Kong still offers its median citizen.

The story of the Tai Po fire is therefore not a morality tale about traditional Chinese negligence, nor a neat parable about one set of local politicians. It is a late chapter in a longer history that begins with colonial land auctions and squatters on hillsides and ends with elderly owner occupiers trapped behind foam covered windows while plastic netting carries flames up their building.

When Western media describe this as not what Hong Kong should be like, they tell only half the truth. It is not what Hong Kong should be like in twenty twenty five. It is very much what Hong Kong was made to be in nineteen fifty five, nineteen eighty five and nineteen ninety seven. The tragedy is that the structure was never dismantled, and that when the fire finally came for Wang Fuk Court, it was not history that burned. It was the people who had been forced to live inside history’s blind spot.

References

Selected sources used in this article. For full methodological details, readers should consult the underlying government statistics and research papers.