Food Streets

The Food Streets here refer to the Tsuen Hing Path and the Shi Lin Food Street. These streets are dominated mostly by beverages business in recent decade. Historically, the shop types have been more diverse when asked the 30-year-old Meh Ah Stationery and Toys shop there. There were salons, garments shops and all sorts of daily goods in the past. Nowadays, there are more visitors who are coming in the place for finding food or special shops like Men Ah Stationery and Toys which is becoming fewer in Hong Kong.

 

Hau Tei Square Hawker Bazaar

The Hau Tei Square Hawker Bazaar is situated at the junction of Chuen Lung Street and Sha Tsui Road. It is of a size of a mini-socceer pitch which sells cheaper goods for the grassroots in Tsuen Wan in the urban core. It is redeveloped in the early 1980s by the governemnt to house two hundred hawkers in Tsuen Wan to condtinue doing business. As they did not require to pay the rent, they placed metal plates on top of their little stalls and clustered together. The conditions were not satisfactory. The air ventilation was poor and with unstable grounds.

Therefore, in the 2012, the District Council cooperated with Home Affairs Department to provide subsidies to build a new indoor bazaar for the hawkers to move in and the environment was much better. The aim was to promote Hau Tei Square's hawkers into a flea market. However, the revitalization only provides the improved living environment, the hawkers still feel the changes of Tsuen Wan affecting them.

*You can click on the middle of the first photo to view old photos of Hau Tei Square.

Shopping Malls

The focused shopping malls are Citywalk and Luk Yeung Galleria in the district. Recently, most of the shopping malls undergoes renewal in the internal layout. For Citywalk, it is one of the urban renewal project under the authority and is located at 1 Yeung Uk Road. It is one of the large-scale modern shopping malls in Hong Kong with its branches connected to Citywalk 2, Nina Tower and the Tsuen Wan Plaza. These malls interconnected to form the largest shopping networks in Tsuen Wan to cater tourism and local vistiors.

Facilitated by the development, the Luk Yeng Galleria and its nearby also revitalized to include larger variety of shops to the place. Most of the shops are chain stores selling medium to high-priced goods.

Tsuen Wan Jewellery and Goldsmith Square

Chung On Street is the place where Tsuen Wan Jewellery and Goldsmith Square dominated. It was designed as a local community project to boost the local economy and attract tourism 10 years ago. It is also included in the Tsuen Wan Chung On Street Revitalising Programme to improve the the pavements and the environemnt on the street. Many mainland individual visitors today come the district and shop for jewellery. However, in recent years, they have been further gentrified into more profitable pharmacies,electrical applicances and cosmetics chain stores.

Problems

From my observation, the problem that Tsuen Wan district facing is the retail gentrification in which the opportunities for traditional shops to survive are reducing and most of them are displaced to the secondary streets in the district. Despite efforts has been done to preserve the hawkers' environemnt, their business future remains dimmed in the interviews findings.

Now, let's look at the causes of the gentrification of shops on the next page!