tim's experiment

The MTR has opened a new shopping mall in Tai Wai, naturally next to the station, called the Wai. This has now displaced Festival Walk as my destination for the weekly Big Shopping Spasm. Oddly, the attraction is not what is there, but what is not there.

In many ways the Wai is much like other malls. It was designed in the modern shopping mall style, which seems intended to maximise the chances of visitors getting lost. All the floors are different shapes; there are few straight lines; escalators are distributed randomly.

The entrance to the car park is also discouraging. You drive four stories down a long and winding spiral road featuring narrow spaces and tight turns. Within days of the mall opening the walls of this road were generously decorated with scrape marks and paint deposits by errant drivers.

The supermarket is, even by Hong Kong standards, a weird shape. Few of our supermarkets follow the boring Western style of floor plan, a large rectangle. The Wai’s supermarket (a Marketplace, Wellcome’s version of Taste; usual local stuff but cosmopolitan decadence also catered for with sushi, choice of cheeses, large wine department etc) is shaped like a deformed dumbell.

What is not there? The tourist traps. There are no international vendors of make-up, perfume, or brand-name handbags, no offerings of watches with real clockwork for the price of a small car, no gold shops. In at least six visits I have only seen one wheeled suitcase.

I have no prejudice, racial or otherwise, against mainlanders. But tourism is an industry which brings benefits to some people and costs to others, a point which seems lost on our government. There is such a thing as enough. Places with Pinterest-worthy attractions have discovered this and acted accordingly. Venice, for example, restricts cruise liners. Barcelona is discouraging Airbnb. Yosemite rations access.

I do not suggest anything like that for Hong Kong. But official dreamers need to recognise that outside the developer hegemony, which has a vested interest in astronomical shop rents, most local people regard visitors to the city like visitors to their home: welcome in limited quantities and at limited times… as long as they behave themselves.

Tourists who congregate at particular spots, as they tend to do, can quickly become an unwelcome part of the scenery. Hong Kong U students have been complaining of tourists gate-crashing their lecturers and photographing the proceedings. I know where this is going. Oxford and Cambridge colleges routinely refuse to admit visitors at all.

Photogenic spots generally may lose their allure if they become a perpetual crowd scene.

This may be a problem which is on the way to solving itself. My early journalism career was spent mostly in fading resorts on the coast of North Lancashire. Morecambe was at the time the butt of cruel jokes. Sample: if you die in Morecambe they prop you up in a bus shelter to make the place look more busy. Blackpool was part-way down the slope which has left it, according to current reports, in many ways the most deprived town in England.

One of the symptoms of decay was a chorus of complaints from local hosts of various kinds that people were no longer coming from a long way away, and as a result visitors did not stay overnight. Most visitors were from nearby towns; they ate their fish and chips, had a few beers and went home the same day.

Another symptom was the increasingly frantic efforts of the local authorities concerned to find some interesting new attraction which would renew the flow of overnight visitors. These rarely seemed to make much difference. Is any of this beginning to sound familiar?

Of course tourist towns can go up as well as down. Historians of the European spa enthusiasm noted the way in which particular spots would suddenly become top destinations after a visit from the Tsar, or the invention of a new bogus water cure. Tourism is like the restaurant business: you are at the mercy of fickle consumers, wafted by the winds of fashion. However good the food, next year’s hot item may steal your customers.

So the search for the secret sauce goes on. Unfortunately it is difficult to be confident that a magical new ingredient will come from an establishment run by mainland officials and recycled policemen. Holiday destinations, like Homeric heroes, are judged by what they are, not by what they do. Hong Kong used to be regarded as a fun place. Now it is not. A shortage of firework displays is not the problem.