Russell West

Russell West - I suppose it must have been about 1987, while working as a graphic artist in London, that I stumbled across an image of the Kowloon walled city in a magazine. It looked to me as if a high rise town had been crushed into a brick by a giant machine. I was mesmerised. Tens of thousands of people - at its peak I believe it was as many as 33,000 - had crammed themselves into an area the size of two football pitches, where they lived and worked. I settled in Hong Kong in 1991 and I visited the city many times before it was demolished by ball and chain in 1993. As the huge concrete ball was raised and dropped on the city at a height of about fourteen stories, the inner honeycomb of rooms and streets was revealed.