BKK street

 

Bangkok street

  

Day 11am Si Phraya Quay

At the ferry pier at Si Phraya where the riverside Portuguese Embassy, with its beautiful wall mural by street artist Vhils, faces off against the extravagant bronze menagerie of statue store “Asian Enterprises” with its nymphs and mermaids, lifesize bronze gorillas, mooses and hippopotami.

BKK street

   

Fight or flight?

I’ve noticed this sticker? mural? on the side of several HK minibuses. No idea what it signifies though.

Streetscrawler

  

The blue people of Kwun Tong

Kwun Tong represents a bygone era for Hong Kong. Its a big, unpretty industrial and business centre in the Eastern part of Kowloon, and in many ways feels like a city apart from the rest of the city, a city in itself (or on the mainland).

It was here that Hong Kong’s last porno theatre operated, here that Communist sympathisers blew up a cinema in the 1970s and here that gunmen hit a street of gold stores in the 1980s in broad daylight. It is hard to imagine any of these things happening in Hong Kong now.

The streets of Kwun Tong are crowded and pressed, squeezed claustrophobically by ten-storey concrete industrial buildings. It is gritty and grimy and people push and shove. There are flyers and posters everywhere for cheap-looking restaurants and whenever I go there, it always seems to be hot.

But like Wong Chuk Hang (and Chai wan) it is this very industrial heritage which makes Kwun Tong an attractive place for local hipsters to set up slightly left-of-centre businesses in big and relatively cheap lofts. It is home to urban bee farms, roof-top farms and (until recently at least) underground rock clubs. I paid a visit over the weekend to see what else was brewing.

My first few destinations were a bit of a bust – the vegetarian restaurant I had been recommended turned out to be a tasty food stall in a mall. It was nice, but not worth crossing town for. The independent bookstore I had caught wind of, Bleakhouse Books, turned out to be open by appointment only. But I hit the jackpot with my third destination, the How cafe (below) as well as these pieces of street art in the area’s otherwise grim alleyways, before heading to the quiet ferry terminal with its lapping waves and peeling paint, to wait a full hour before the next ferry came to take me back to the island.

  

 

HK Street

 

Bangkok: design city

 

The Thai capital continues to blossom as a design force with this co-working space in the Habito mall recently awarded a prestigious prize from Archdaily magazine for “Best interior of 2017”.

Below, street art from Lisbon artist Vhils on the wall of the historic Portuguese embassy, marking the four hundred year old ties between Thailand and Portugal, one of its first Western traders, who left a now-almost-vanished expat community on the Thonburi side of the river for centuries.

Subhashok The Art Centre, an impressive concrete structure in the leafy Sukhumvit hinterland, is another addition to the city’s growing and impressive art scene, with mural by Cece Nobre.

 

And finally hair salon Klinsuwan reconnect with the city’s Southeast Asian roots, through walls of golden bamboo.

 

 

Queens Road West

  

Melbourne street art

  

Fitzroy street

  

  

Richmond grafitti…and a strange Kanye West fixation