Thames Town calling
- Source: The Global Times
- [21:29 June 09 2009]
- Comments
Thames Town of Song Jiang in Shanghai downtown. Photo: Xinhua
By Xu Shenglan
For Cindy Wang, a 25-year-old executive in Shanghai, the weekday begins with her customary rush to get to the workplace. There are no fascinating sights to soak in or anything that lends some excitement to the surroundings. All that an ordinary Shanghainese does on a typical day is to scramble to reach office on time.
In contrast, in a suburb 70 kilometers away from Shanghai downtown, people live another kind of lifestyle. They wake up by the bell of the Gothic-look-alike church, walk past the Cob Gate Fish & Chips and piazza while guards in red uniforms nod hello; people living in Thames Town of Song Jiang start a beautiful day with the smell of sunshine and coffee.
“Thames Town fulfills our fairy tale dream and is also a romantic witness to our love,” gushes Liu Yihan, a bride-to-be, posing for a photograph with her fiancé. It is once in a lifetime experience for her. Bride and groom taking wedding pictures can be seen everywhere in the town; young couples craving for exotic flavors can have a fashionable white wedding without going abroad.
The British-style village with Georgian, Victorian and Tudor architectures is part of Shanghai’s “One City Nine-Satellite Towns” program, which aims to relieve population pressure and break the mold of dull rural development.
“It’s a tough job to attract people out of the city into the outskirts, unless there is an atmosphere and lifestyle that can’t be found downtown,” according to Li Kai, an expert of Shanghai Urban Planning and Design Research Institute.
“Houses of the town have been sold out with 30 percent-occupancy rate now. Other residents spend weekends and holidays here or invest in it for second-hand house sale, for which the price have doubled now,” a staff of the developers, Shanghai Henghe Real Estate, told Global Times.
The one-square kilometer town has been developed into a community township incorporating a school with sporting facilities, kindergarten, club, theatre, hospital and hotel. Various cultural and arts festivals, exhibitions are frequently held here.
The town has become a tourist attraction with visitors thronging to have a look at the Western-style architectures and for scouting interesting corners for photography.