A happy new year to everyone, especially members of the community who share the growing interest in preserving heritage sites. The Antiquities Advisory Board, of which I am now chairman, is starting off 2009 with some changes.
One of the main changes is to the board's method of rating historic buildings - we have more than 1,400 sites to classify - as grade I, II or III, in decreasing order of importance. In the past, the rating system has been mainly for our own internal reference to guide the board when it advises the government about the heritage value of a site.
The grading system will now be directly linked to the work of the Antiquities and Monuments Office (AMO), which has the power to give a site monument status to protect it. This means the AMO should now automatically consider all the sites we list as grade I to be potential monuments.
As an advisory body, the board has no statutory powers, but we can now highlight sites that we believe are definitely worth preserving. We hope that this will strengthen protection for the most valuable heritage sites. (The guidelines have also been revised to highlight lower-grade sites as well, so in some circumstances we will expect the AMO to advance its scope in considering them for monument status.)
This obviously raises the question of which criteria we use for deciding how to grade a site. The central consideration is 'heritage significance', which refers to such things as architectural merit, rarity and historical importance. There was a bit of a controversy recently when the press reported that, because of this, we would not be taking 'collective memory' into account.
This is not true. Our officials have quite a strong 'collective memory' of the protests about the demolition of the Star Ferry Pier and the removal of Queen's Pier! The strength of public opinion, especially among the young, took them by surprise, and they have learned that the past is important to many Hong Kong people. Government moves slowly, but it is changing its approach on this issue (as it is with the related issue of building density).