They have helped transform London and Manchester with monolithic monuments and spectacular redesigns of entire city districts, now British-based architects Fred Manson and Thomas Heatherwick are turning their talents to something considerably smaller -- a playground.

The pair have flown half-way around the world to give a lift to the 70-year old Southorn Playground in the heart of the special administrative region's seedy Wan Chai neighborhood.

Just big enough to hold a small football pitch and four basketball courts, the grubby playground is a far cry from London's glamorous South Bank development that American-born Manson gave a facelift, or the sculptures and urban artscapes for which Heatherwick was this year named Britain's "most creative mind" by the Times newspaper.

But in the refurbishment of Southorn's decaying benches, cramped children's play area and darkened lairs, the pair see an opportunity to address a broader need for open space in rapidly urbanizing Hong Kong.

"The playground is very important as we've seen how Wan Chai is changing," said Heatherwick. "There are lots of forces tugging and changing the area and here is a piece of land that is looking very vulnerable ... very developable.

"The more we can make this a more fantastic place -- a stage for sports, relaxation and greenery -- the more it will consolidate that space and save it from the developers."

While cities such as London and New York fill and redevelop urban gaps such as gardens and abandoned warehouses to provide a pressure release valve for overcrowding, Hong Kong is struggling to preserve what little city space it does have.

Containing some of the world's most densely populated urban areas, the tiny southern Chinese territory has lost not only much of its open areas, but also most of the historic low-level structures that allowed at least some sunshine into the darkened chasms between the city skyscrapers.

In the past year a 19th century city centre police compound was administered its last rights and a sprawling early 20th century city mansion was put under the auctioneer's gavel and, ultimately, the crane's wrecking-ball.

With Southorn's growing reputation as a hang-out for winos and drugs pedlars, and its down-at-heel appearance a further blot on a blighted neighborhood, Manson and Heatherwick fear it is a prime candidate to go the same way.

"We chose the site after a conference on public art in Hong Kong," he said. "We would like to call it an 'urban intervention.' We asked ourselves, if we could place one pebble in Wan Chai, where would it have the biggest ripples?"

With (undisclosed) funding by the British Council, which reckoned the best way to promote British talent here was to show it off in real projects, and with the blessing of the local council, the two set about a public consultation in which they interviewed hundreds of park users on what changes they would like to see.

While there is no guarantee that their design will be adopted -- or that the space will be renovated at all -- they are nonetheless dedicated to preserving what they found was far from a neglected wasteground, but was in fact a focal point of public activity in old Wan Chai, an area famous for its red-light district and go-go bars.

"It's an extraordinary place, this space with sports and things slap bang in the middle of the city -- it's wonderful the way it sticks out," says Heatherwick.

"It's a special, thronging place. It's alive, it's a happening place. Our task is to make the most of that site."

At the moment the park is used mostly by young men who play football and basketball and older men who sit in the stands watching them.

Manson and Heatherwick want to retain all the park's present facilities, but re-arrange them in a way that makes the space more appealing to a wider group of people -- especially women and children.

It is a challenge neither designer has faced before.

With little more than a few unused nooks and corners to do anything new with, the pair hope to create something as enthralling as the 150-metre "B in the Bang" Commonwealth Games monument that Heatherwick designed for Manchester or the famous curling bridge he built in London's Paddington docks.

"We are not making something that I know of in the West -- there is no model," says Heatherwick. "It is forcing us to think in different ways and use our objectivity, not any pre-set patterns."

They both reject the notion that they will be importing alien design ideals to a city culturally distant from London.

"I'm resistant to simplifying countries into groups," says Heatherwick. "Within different countries, different spaces and cities have different feelings and people do different things -- and yet globally there are similarities."

Manson agrees, saying the only part of the design process that had to be changed was the public consultation.

"During the consultation we didn't get anybody telling us what we were doing was wrong," he says. "They said they just wanted things to be different. So that gave us sanction to carry on. That silent sanction was the best part about it."

(China Daily April 20, 2005)