As the scheme set off, land was reclaimed from the eastern end of the Royal Naval Dockyard (junction between Hennessey Road and Johnston Road today) to the western end of the Jardine’s warehouse at East Point (Percival Street today). Fill materials were extracted from Morrison Hill and Jardine’s Hill. The new eastern waterfront thus formed was Gloucester Road today, but at that time it was just a two-lane carriageway at the coast. The old waterfront, which was turned into usable land, became Johnston Road.

With a total formation area of 86 acres, this reclamation project, completed in 1931, created the vast land that lies between Johnston Road, Hennessey Road and Gloucester Road, from Arsenal Street in the west to Percival Street in the east. Tenement houses in three or four storeys began to emerge in Hennessey Road, forming the earliest residential district on this new-formed land. There, too, the government put up Violet Peel Health Clinic and Southorn Playground, the latter being a commoner’s park — where, except when sport games were held for the Chinese, workers waited for piecework during the day and the people at large found it a paradise for food and entertainment at night. As the Royal Navy set up dormitories and clubhouses near Arsenal Street, a good number of unwedded Navy sailors began to divert themselves in the new waterfront. Lockhart Road, then newly built, was very soon turned into a pub street, later a red-light district. During the Japanese occupation it naturally became a “comfort zone” of the Japanese army.