Tucked into a walk-up on Peel Street, Crafts on Peel invites us to take another look at the trades that once defined the city’s streets. The charitable foundation occupies a restored tong lau at 11 Peel Street in Central. Built in 1948, the building is a typical walk-up tenement, with shopfronts at street level and families living above.
Rather than treating craft as nostalgic, Crafts on Peel aims to “revive, reinterpret and perpetuate” traditional skills by pairing older masters with contemporary designers and apprentices.
Inside, the workbenches are just old tables shoved together, none of them matching. Their surfaces tell you where they’ve been – scratches going every which way, dents where a hammer got away from someone, pale rings left by tea mugs, faint pencil marks that survived the last wipe-down, and burn marks here and there where a soldering iron lingered too long.
Conversation drifts in and out, slipping between Cantonese and English before trailing off into nothing. What fills the gaps is the sound of the work itself – a blade drawn along a plank, sandpaper hissing across the grain, the soft clink of metal on metal, and, every so often, a tool coming down on the bench harder than intended.
The foundation that runs the space focuses on trades once common across the city – bamboo cages, neon signs, copperware, carved tiles – and on pairing those who still practice them with younger designers and apprentices through exhibitions, residencies and workshop programs.
Most of the city’s old workshops closed years ago. Heritage registers and academic surveys indicate that only a small number of masters are still working – their crafts officially recognized as part of Hong Kong’s cultural inheritance, though that recognition hasn’t done much to secure their future.
Open Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm, Crafts on Peel feels more like a working studio that has allowed the public to wander in – a place where the emphasis is on keeping hands busy and knowledge in circulation, one object at a time, and on showing that these crafts can sit alongside contemporary design rather than be displayed behind glass as period pieces. Well worth a visit anytime!
Bernard Charnwut Chan is the chairman of the West Kowloon Cultural District
