Coming Down Alert – Gulou and Houhai, Beijing

Apologies for the lack of “Coming Down Alerts” on this site this year – sadly it is not due to lack of destruction but rather that I have been out of China for work, book and family reasons since late April and so not on the ground to see stuff.

However, I did note this picture of some new residential housing in the Gulou and Houhai area of Beijing posted by Marga Zambrana, a Spanish journalist working in Beijing who does notice such things. She writes:

“New real estate development near Gulou and Houhai. Wondering how much will be their price considering that none of the houses have windows or terrace over the artificial river… They demolished historical hutong for doing this…”

It is a shame to lose hutong to this sort of housing – they’re nothing special so I’d need some compelling evidence that the hutong properties were beyond all salvaging to make it worth building these. And truly odd that nobody event thought to put in a small window overlooking river – artificial or otherwise.the red bricks also indicate that the inevitable secondary wall (one be surrounded by one wall when you can be surrounded by several?) will be going up round the development too.