Blake Garden

The Blake Garden is just along Kiu In Fong and Po Hing Fong Streets in Sai Ying Pun. This is an urban park area named after Hong Kong Governor Henry Arthur Blake (1989-1903). What you will find here are a handful fo sports grounds - badminton and basketball courts as well as a football pitch, crammed into a rectangular shaped urban park. There is also elderly exercise equipment and at the ends, short pathways between some impressive Chinese Banyan tree specimen, which are nice to see. Here you'll find a few park benches as well.

Perhaps even more interesting the the park itself the history of the grounds where it is situated. This was ground zero for the bubonic plaque outbreak in 1894. At that time, a densely populated area with deplorable sanitation was believed to be a major cause for the spread of the plaque. As a result the government, having determined that the area was unfit for human habitation, bought the land, demolished the tenement structures and created the public park (1905) that you can visit today.

You can learn more about the history of Blake Garden as part of a self-walk tour called the Taipingshan Heritage Trail. There is also related info at the nearby HK Museum of Medical Sciences.