Hong Kong’s entire modern development has been dependent on reclamation. The very first urban settlements were laid out below slopes which, in most places, had virtually no coastal strip. Indeed, a glance at any map of the late nineteenth century shows Hong Kong’s severe shortage of developable land – with virtually all the buildings clustered along the foreshore. By the 1930s a number of ‘strip’ reclamations had extended out the foreshore of Central District by some one hundred metres, with the Wanchai and Kowloon waterfronts more substantially reclaimed. Hedda Morrison’s telling view over the Wanchai tenements, in the 1946 – 47 section ‘Eastern Districts’, shows the grid-planned reclamation streetscape. Yet her images also reveal, as seen opposite, how wide Victoria Harbour remained – with its scalloped bays (such as Causeway Bay) and its deep indentations (such as Kowloon Bay). Kellett Island, like a white fortress, stood a third of a kilometre offshore.
 
The 1950s and 1960s saw substantial reclamations, notably in Central, around the urban periphery of Kowloon, for the Kai Tak airstrip, and to the east and west for industrial development. Still further areas were filled in during the next two decades, but nonetheless the process remained incremental and based on justifiable needs. The 1990s harbour reclamations were different in kind: then, driven more by technological power and grandiose government plans (urged on by the separate, and essential, massive airport related reclamations) great chunks of the harbour were filled in.