Maryknoll Convent School began in 1925 as a kindergarten on Austin Road. As Kowloon Tong developed, the Sisters of St. Dominic planned a new campus on Waterloo Road. Construction began in 1933, and the main building was completed in 1937. The school moved to the new premises to offer education from kindergarten through college entrance. Its building was planned around an open courtyard and cloisters, a form that gave the campus an inward-facing centre.
From the journal
A School Interrupted: Maryknoll’s Wartime Hospital Years
Maryknoll’s main building moved from education to wartime hospital use and back, while its courtyard plan and architectural details endured.
In this district · Kowloon City ↗A school moves to Kowloon Tong
An interruption from 1942 to 1945
The Second World War interrupted the school’s operation. From 1942 to 1945, the main building was used as a Japanese military hospital. This wartime period changed the building’s function, and the school resumed its educational role after the war. After the war, school activity returned, and the campus continued to develop; the convent beside the main building, started before the war, was completed in 1953. A school building thus carries a record of both an ordinary civic purpose and a forced wartime use.
A courtyard and a staircase
The main block is arranged like a medieval monastery or college, with cloisters surrounding an open peristyle courtyard. Its free neo-Tudor design incorporates Art Deco, Romanesque, Neo-Georgian and Gothic Revival elements. The granite staircase facing Boundary Street, pointed arches and vaulted auditorium ceiling offer different ways to read the architecture. Each feature belongs to a school designed for education, but the courtyard arrangement also helps explain why the building could be adapted to another institutional use during wartime.
A landmark still used for education
Maryknoll’s primary section has remained in the main building, and the school complex is preserved in very good condition. The surviving fabric lets the building’s different periods sit together: the school’s early campus, the wartime hospital and the renewed educational use after 1945. Its history is not a succession of unrelated episodes. The same courtyard and rooms accommodated changing needs, while the school’s return gave the building a continuing role in Kowloon Tong.