Tai Po: New Territories’ answer to Central, but with bicycles and picnickers

Last month, Staunton Street craft beer joint Beer & Fish opened a second location – in Tai Po. It’s a quiet part of the district, to be precise, next to an old Tin Hau temple, incense smoke billowing from its chimney. Why would a bar from Central expand to a seemingly obscure corner of the New Territories?

“Tai Po is a special place,” says manager Denus Leung. “There are more than 40 different bars and pubs here. For people living around here, in villages or [upscale suburban estate] Hong Lok Yuen, Tai Po is Central.”

In some ways, it’s an apt comparison: Tai Po town centre is an island of activity in a sea of greenery, packed with shopping streets, markets, restaurants and bars. And yet the pace of life is entirely different. There’s something about the extra-long distance between University and Tai Po Market stations on the MTR that slows things down. Tai Po can be busy, but it’s also a green, laid-back place where people get around by bicycle. It’s a kinder, gentler version of Hong Kong.

It turns out that was the plan all along. Tai Po was one of several historic market towns selected for expansion in the 1970s as part of the government’s New Territories development strategy. Urban planner Peter Cookson-Smith was among the consultants hired to work on the master plan. Most of the new development was slated for reclaimed land, through which two nullahs drained the Lam Tsuen and Tai Po rivers into Tolo Harbour. 

Cookson-Smith wanted to avoid the approach taken elsewhere in Hong Kong, which was to treat nullahs as fenced-off drainage channels.

“If you look at the nullahs in some of the other new towns, they are pretty grim,” he says. “In Tai Po, there was an opportunity to transform them into recreation areas. The water became part of the overall planning structure. It’s a connective element with promenades along the sides.”