JG Ballard Shanghai Home

JG Ballard's Amherst Ave Home in Shanghai... Gone.

A series of updates from Shanghai... scroll down for the most recent.

October 27, 2009

The SH508 people have sold the house and moved to a new location around the corner. The house is currently under renovation of some kind.

Will keep my eye on it, but, in Shanghai, despite the govenment 'protection' of old houses, everytime one of the villas changes hands there's a 50 percent chance it goes, at least in it's original form.

Also, the Longhua runway and the original guard booth we saw by the railway are both dug up and going as part of the expo site work.

Andy Best

November 27, 2009

I just returned from a trip through China. Made it to Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. I stopped by JG Ballard's boyhood home in Shanghai. It's currently undergoing a major renovation. The construction workers were aware of the historical significance of the home. Hopefully it will be finished with respect to its origins.

Dan Butterfield
Editor, http://iphonasia.com

These photos were taken on November 17, 2009. That's Dan Butterfield.

November 27, 2009

What happens with the houses is this. All the ones we saw that have the heritage signs are 'protected'. But it's not really checked in advance. There's just a rule that these houses cannot have the outside appearance altered or you get fined.

So what I've seen happen is that a house changes hands and they get someone in to renovate it. Now, this is exactly what happened to the Ballard house. They strip the house down to it's outer frame, sometimes even taking out supporting pillars. It looks like a barn that's just had the first sections raised. It is then completely built as new - except the 'frame' they leave up allows them to reproduce the basic shape of the building before.

As far as I could see, the only remaining part of the original Ballard house was the back wall (original front door site). I'd be surprised if it was there now. I took some photos but they looked the same as Dan took for you.

The new structure is made from solid concrete walls with a fake brick look veneer of cheap tiles stuck on it.

Basically, the house is gone.

I'll check in again soon.

Andy Best

January 17, 2010

Concerning the house, yeah, I went yesterday and it's much worse.

They ended up stripping it to the beams, it looked like a barn. Now it's re-made out of concrete. Only the old front door down the lane is untouched, but not for long.

Andy Best

February 27, 2010

JG Ballard's childhood home gutted (The Telegraph)

By Malcolm Moore in Shanghai

The childhood home of the author JG Ballard which featured in his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun has been completely gutted by developers.

See a video of the reconstruction

Ballard, who passed away last year, was born in pre-war Shanghai and grew up in the mock Tudor house at 31a Amherst Avenue, now 508 Panyu Lu.

"It was a magical place," he wrote, remembering his childhood in the city. "There were receptions at the French Club, race meetings at the Shanghai Racecourse and various patriotic gatherings at the British Embassy on the Bund, the city's glamorous waterfront area."

When the Japanese invaded Shanghai in 1937, the author was separated from his family and sent to a prisoner of war camp in the south of Shanghai. "I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded," wrote Mr Ballard.

The house at Amherst Avenue was built in 1925 by English architects who took the golf course mansions being built in Surrey as their model.
The memory of the house stayed with Mr Ballard, who provided fans searching for the property with detailed maps of its interior and of the neighbourhood. The author visited the home at the beginning of the 1990s, and found it "still standing, though in a state of extreme dilapidation".
He said: "It had served as the library of a state electronics institute and metal book racks had replaced the furniture on all three floors. Nothing, otherwise, had changed and I noticed that the same lavatory seat was in my bathroom."

Even then, however, he felt the house would soon fall prey to Shanghai's construction boom. "I feared that my old family home would soon be replaced by a high-rise block of flats. It is good to see that it's still there," he wrote, to a fan who sent him pictures of the property in 2007.

Until the end of last year, the house was being used as a restaurant, and while many of the original features had been covered over, the structure of the house was intact. It had also been listed as one of Shanghai's Heritage buildings.

However, after the restaurant's lease on the property expired, developers moved in to strip the entire building bare, back to its beams, before rebuilding it out of concrete. A fake front will shortly be attached, and builders said that they had wanted to increase the floorspace inside.
A spokesman for the restaurant which had been on the premises commented: "It is ancient history. We do not even know who lived there in the 1990s." He added that no one at the restaurant had heard of Mr Ballard.

Historians in the city said that Shanghai still has a collective amnesia about its pre-war past, and that building regulations remain sparse. "There are no rules, really about what you can do to a heritage house, unless it is a Grade A, of which there are very few," said Peter Hibbard, the president of the Royal Asiatic Society. "Even in the Grade A houses, you can change the exterior, as long as it is possible to change it back, whatever that means," he added.

March 10, 2010

The disappearance of J.G. Ballard's Shanghai home (Shanghaiist)

With so much of Shanghai's historical architecture disappearing day by day, you might think that most Shanghailanders, ourselves included, have become desensitized to the frequent reports of demolition and destruction. Looks like that isn't true, as we are still heartbroken over Malcolm Moore's recent story on the latest casualty of Shanghai's relentless urban development, British author J.G. Ballard's childhood home.

Ballard, who passed away last year, was born in Shanghai in 1930 and is best known for "Empire of the Sun" - a work of autobiographical fiction that draws extensively on his childhood in the city's colonial era and his experiences during World War II. His old home at 31a Amherst Avenue (now 508 Panyu Lu, now a concrete block) was a mock Tudor mansion built by English architects in 1925, and featured prominently in his memories of Shanghai. It was a "magical" place where his family enjoyed the glamorous life of club receptions and horse-racing before the 1937 Japanese invasion led to their internment at Longhua Camp in the south of the city (now Shanghai Zhongxue).

And so the battle between preservation and development continues, the former seeming on the losing side. With every small victory, tens of cemented-over former architectural glories appear.

But what would J.G. Ballard himself have thought of the gutting of his former home? Judging from his letters, he might have been a little desensitized himself, and accepted it as the inevitable. While he was excited and immensely curious about his fans' journeys to his old Shanghai haunts, he wrote that "one would expect any city in the world to have changed virtually out of recognition in 40 years, and know that the emotional pickings from the nostalgia dish to be pretty meager". In response to news that his home had become a restaurant, his seemingly flippant reply was "if it's a restaurant, let's hope it's a McDonald's or KFC". He also revealed that these trips into nostalgia felt a little "intrusive" due to the length of time gone by; "In an odd way it's quite reassuring that everything has changed so much -- the Shanghai I knew, along with 31 Amherst Avenue and Lunghua camp, only survive inside my head."
Reassuring it may have been to Ballard, but not to us. Perversely, perhaps his home should have been a McDonald's or KFC - maybe if it had been a hopping commercial fast food establishment, the house would have been spared its fate as a cement block.

April 7th, 2010

Update on the destruction of J.G. Ballard's old home (Shanghaiist)

Photo by Paul French

This sad little picture, taken by Paul French at China Rhyming, depicts what's left of British writer J.G. Ballard's childhood home now that it's been thoroughly gutted. Located on Panyu Lu and Xinhua Lu, the expat villa-turned-restaurant turned into a construction mess early last month.

Says French:

Popped round to see just how total the interior devastation was to the former home of JG Ballard – it’s entrance is now on Panyu Road (Columbia Road) but was originally on Amherst Road (now Xinhua Road). As I noted in a post before Malcolm Moore, the Daily Telegraph’s man in Shanghai, uploaded a video of the destruction a while back. Well, the interior is now completely gone – entirely ripped out, concreted over and when I was there the other day plenty of old timber was being ripped out too. All the old doors have also been taken off and thrown out. Additionally, all the old roof tiles are gone and a new concrete/brick structure erected to the right of the original frame of the building.

So that’s Ballard’s old house house then – fucked!

Well, the interior is now completely gone - entirely ripped out, concreted over and when I was there the other day plenty of old timber was being ripped out too. All the old doors have also been taken off and thrown out. Additionally, all the old roof tiles are gone and a new concrete/brick structure erected to the right of the original frame of the building.

While Ballard himself may not have wasted too much sentiment on his former residence, notably responding that if it had become a restaurant, "let's hope it's a McDonalds or KFC," it's a little hard for the rest of us to let go of such an interesting piece of history in the city.