After the disaster, the government put the wreckage to good use: the rubble, mixed with the debris extracted from hill slope, was used to reclaim land from the intersection between Jervois Street, Wellington Street and Queen’s Road Central to the junction of Jervois Street and Morrison Street. The new waterfront was paved a new road of 50-foot width, namely Bonham Strand. It thus became the first official reclamation project in the history of Hong Kong.

When the Bonham Strand construction project was under way, the waterfront north of Queen’s Road near Central was also extended seaward, reaching today’s Des Voeux Road Central. The formation was called Bowring Praya Central.

In 1856, Governor John Bowring came up with the “Praya Reclamation Scheme”, which aimed at constructing a waterfront promenade below the Government Hill, approximately 4-mile-long and 50-foot-wide, from the Central waterfront to North Point (i.e. Causeway Bay). The proposal, however, was strongly objected to: the ambiguous terms involved in the 1841 land sale had given legitimate property rights of the waterfront to many foreign merchant firms, who could never stand to allow a reclamation project that would supplant their rights in docking along the coast. Headed by Dent & Co., these interested parties staged their protests through different channels. As a result of their outcry, as well as the government’s own financial difficulty, the project was aborted. In 1866 the government again raised plan to reclaim land in the eastern part of Central District, this time disapproved by the military on the ground that it upset military establishments and thus the city’s security. The plan was, therefore, another futile attempt.