Simon Butterworth Photography

Terminal is a photographic journey to each of the twenty-two (2016) terminal stations on Hong Kong’s Mass Transit Railway network. I was interested in the rapid development of the peripheries of the city and the overdevelopment of longer established districts. What were once far-flung areas at the rural edges have been inexorably drawn into the metropolis by the tentacles of the MTR.

Everywhere I travelled, the city showed evidence of expansion at an alarming speed, mammoth civil engineering projects like the Hong Kong - Zhuhai - Macao Bridge dominating entire landscapes.

Although Hong Kong is a city with very large green areas, most of the land for large-scale development has long since been built upon. Recent growth has taken place on land reclaimed from the sea, and huge islands are entirely man-made, as at the airport and AsiaWorld Expo. Because of the shortage of suitable land, people are crammed into existing sites in greater and greater numbers, usually by building upwards and dramatically reducing living space. Some places, like Mong Kok, have the highest residential densities in the world.

Areas in the north of the New Territories, next to the Chinese border, are relatively lightly populated, but the shadow of the Pearl Delta mega-city of Shenzhen looms across the Sham Chun River like an ogre waiting to devour everything in its path.