A very nice photo of the Baguio Villa still under construction in 1973. It was a large private housing project developed by the New World Development Company at Victoria Road in Hong Kong Island in the seventies. The photo is from the New World Development Company Limited Report 1973. It shows the part of the Baguio Villa on the ocean side of Victoria Road under construction. The hillside part of the Baguio Villa was developed later, but one can see in the photo that excavation had already started. It was the first high-rise project at Victoria Road.
I have not been able to find any written documentation but I believe that the public bus started serving Victoria Road after the Baguio Villa was completed to facilitate people (mainly servants) living there to travel to the Central or nearby markets in the Wah Fu estate. I still remember that in the sixties, there was no public bus service on Victoria Road. The closest bus services were the No. 3A bus to Mount Davis, No. 4 bus to Queen Mary Hospital, and No. 7 bus to Aberdeen (via PokFuLam Road). Walking along Victoria Road in the sixties was like hiking in the countryside in New Territories with unobstructed scenery, no bus and only the occasional motor car driving by, and surrounded by herds of happy dairy cows!
In the background are three groups of buildings. Those on the left side of the photo are residential apartments and some HKU facility buildings at Sasson Road. Sassoon Road is one of the two roads connecting PokFuLam Road to Victoria Road. The group of buildings in the middle is Queen Mary Hospital. It appears that the hospital's main building is blocked by all the new facility buildings. The two high rises on the right side of the photo are No. 138 PokFuLam Road and the HKU Middleton residential quarter which is located behind.
The waterfront on the left side of the photo is no longer a waterfront. It was reclaimed about 25 years ago and became the high-tech Cyberport. Surprisingly, the coast off Cyberport is still called Telegraph Bay even though, after the reclamation, it is no longer a “bay” anymore.