This Sunday at 7.15pm on BBC Radio 3 my “Between the Ears” documentary Return to the City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City

Posted: February 15th, 2026 | No Comments »

This Sunday at 7.15pm on BBC Radio 3 my “Between the Ears” documentary Return to the City of Darkness: Kowloon Walled City. Afterwards it’ll be on BBC.com and the BBC Sounds app. 

Kowloon Walled City – ‘the City of Darkness’ – vanished from the face of the earth in 1993, torn down as the world’s craziest, densest and most notorious slum. Yet the public memory and re-imagining of it has never stopped. It represents a kind of dynamic, chaotic, insane dream space where people made their lives work despite the greatest odds. 

Nowadays at Hong Kong airport, the one that replaced Kai Lak (where vast jumbo jets once soared only a hundred feet over the higgledy piggledy structure that was Kowloon), you can buy replicas of sections of the city. Kowloon lives in Manga, animation, video games and most stunningly in the 2024 Hong Kong actioner, Twilight of the Warriors-Walled In. The film meticulously recreated Kowloon in all its filthy, claustrophobic anarchy. Perfectly capturing the dense, dank, dripping world of pipes, steam and bewildering geography. We summon up the vanished Kowloon to recreate the City of Darkness; drawing on oral histories from its last postman, a Salvation Army worker, former residents, chroniclers of the city’s history and bewildering architecture and those who have now turned it into vibrant stories and settings for an ever curious global audience. For there will never be another Kowloon. 

A Storyscape production for BBCR3

Presenter: Paul French

Producer: Mark Burman

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