How we slowly made a home of Hong Kong

The city is all but unrecognisable from the days when the population was largely transient, millions lived in squalid hillside squatter towns and thinking green meant avoiding mould in rubbish-carpeted alleyways

It was a daily miracle. Every morning on my way to work, I would stop and look at the long files of children winding down muddy tracks hacked from the steep rocky flanks above North Point. They came down the hillsides through makeshift squatter villages, frail homes knocked up out of corrugated iron, discarded planks and cardboard boxes.

The children filled the streets that took them the last few metres of their journey to the tram stops of King's Road. All were neatly dressed, with school uniform shirts blindingly white. They emerged from squalor and poverty in shanty towns that had one water standpipe serving 100 huts - if they were lucky - spic and span and almost bursting with ambition. In the desperate years of the 1960s launch-pad era, they had hope, determination and ambition.

Watching them cram aboard my tram every day, I regarded those children as an inspiration. The illegal squatter settlements covered almost every inch of the slopes, shack perched above shack, stacked in chaotic swathes, across the mountainous flank from Tai Hang to Chai Wan. Similar big hut-cities of the desperate existed in Kowloon, perched in every spot where human ingenuity could find space to throw up fragile walls overnight.

Visitors got a bird's-eye view of festering miles of drab huts as their aircraft swooped low towards Kai Tak airport. People arriving by ships lined the rails looking in disbelief at the shacks on the cliff face at the western tip of Hong Kong Island near Green Island. The squatter villages and towns housed at least 465,000 in 1968, people on the bottom rung of the social and financial ladder.

Those well-groomed students from the grubby slums went to primary schools which from 1971 were free. There was a great hunger for education, seen as the first step to a better life.