Something new: Love stories and bygone business reveal history of Island East

What images do the words "island east" bring to mind for you? Glitzy offices, swanky restaurants and floor upon floor of shops in Taikoo's fancy malls? It wasn't always this way. The east of Hong Kong Island has a long, rich history, which a new exhibition seeks to rediscover through tales of love, bygone business and family history.

Let's start with Taikoo Shing. Today more than 12,000 apartments compete for harbour views in an unwinnable race to the sky. But before the area was redeveloped in the 1980s, it was the site of a dockyard that built some of the biggest ships the world had seen.

And it was in this Taikoo dockyard that Lam Ng-yuen, now 88 years old, met the love of his life, a clerk in the yard where he worked as a ship-repair technician.

Lee Kwok-ching is the matriarch of three generations of her family, all of whom were born and bred on the east of the island. She explains how the Lees have witnessed the area's drastic transformation.

"Stories from Island East" tells the tales of 15 elderly residents, such as Lam, Lee and Lui Yung-chu, one of Hong Kong's first female tram drivers, back when women were not allowed to work past midnight on the ding ding. The exhibition combines text, historical images and mementoes, including a limited-edition mug from 1953 marking Queen Elizabeth's coronation.