Hong Kong’s new 13km promenade is revitalising community life and wellbeing
A freshly completed harbourside promenade on Hong Kong Island is drawing the city’s residents out to play and providing them with a new way to enjoy the waterfront.
“I can always train,” says Allard, a well-preserved 70-year-old retiree between the slow, rhythmic movements of his dawn t’ai chi practice. “By myself or with friends, whatever the weather,” he says, exhaling after a pause. “I love exercising on the promenade.”
Along the Hong Kong Island waterfront, the busy city breathes a little more freely. Joggers trace the skyline, students buzz around a picnic table and a child’s laughter pierces the air as a nanny gives chase. This is the rhythm of the promenade – a seamless 13km ribbon of public life connecting Kennedy Town in the west to Shau Kei Wan in the east. The project was completed in late December 2025.
This uninterrupted stretch, which is the result of a 16-year, hk$6.5bn (€720m) enhancement programme, has helped to redefine the maritime island’s relationship with its shoreline. To walk its length is to see the city from dawn to dusk: starting with early-morning t’ai chi sessions facing the sunrise to office workers nattering on lawns at lunchtime, right through to a glowing Hong Kong take on the evening passeggiata.
Designed to be both utilitarian and whimsical, the promenade integrates playful, interactive features: criss-crossing metal tubes double as a sound installation for curious visitors and a stretch rack for runners; slides; cloud-shaped inflatables; pet-friendly zones; a glass floor that is already regularly thronged with tourists; and exhibition areas that animate the space, their colours reflected in the harbour’s restless moving waters.
The setting seems fitting for a metropolis that is proudly ranked among the world’s most walkable, where residents are champion pedestrians, logging a world-leading average of 10,663 steps daily, according to the latest data from US technology firm Garmin. However, that’s far from the only kind of movement that you will find in a city that rarely stands still.
For the old and young, this seaside artery is a lifeline to community and health that offers options given the size of many apartments in the densely populated Hong Kong – which are small by most standards. Something is working too. It has one of the world’s longest life expectancies, at more than 85 years on average. Seniors are projected to make up 36 per cent of the population by 2046, so the newly finished promenade’s role as public infrastructure will only deepen as it connects them to peers and the wider community.
“I come here to study,” Rui Zhao, a 24-year-old musicology student at the University of Hong Kong, tells Monocle. “It’s free, I don’t have to go to campus and the view is unbeatable,” she adds as she settles down with her computer at a newly installed harbourfront table.
“We come here so that the children can truly run around,” says one parent, pausing as her children gamely ascend an impressively multicoloured climbing hill. “They have space to be kids here,” she says, watching a little cautiously. “And I have a moment to breathe.”
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