THE TWILIGHT ZONE

IT was a truly extraordinary, nightmarish place. A teeming twilight world. A jumble of unreal images springing out of the gloom at every step. Barbie-doll legs stamped out in their thousands by a hissing, clanking machine supervised by a seven-year-old boy.

A dozen chefs in singlets and shorts would stand in a filthy, dingy room preparing an endless stream of shiny white fishballs. Around the corner, rows of ready-to-munch false teeth grimaced through the window of an unlicensed dentist's shop. Overhead, a creeping vine of water pipes and power cables hung suspended, sometimes drooping to shoulder height, entangled and entwined in an unruly dripping mass, and laden with years of rubbish jettisoned from floors above.

That was the Kowloon Walled City, Hong Kong's city of darkness.

It's all gone now, of course, but into that strange lawless place, the oddest historical anomaly of colonial times, ventured two men with a mission - photographers Ian Lambot and Greg Girard.

Day after day, week after week in the late 1980s, they braved the dirt and the gloom, and the indifference, not to say antagonism, of the city's inhabitants to make a record of the place which, it had been announced, was about to become one of the biggest demolition jobs ever undertaken.

The result is the book The City of Darkness.

Lambot originally trained as an architect but later turned to photography and publishing. His was the definitive photo book of the building of Sir Norman Foster's new Hongkong Bank building, with the Bank's blessing.