Vertical Sacred City
Explore how addresses and floors reveal worship inside the city’s buildings.
Worship above the street
The 2022 atlas contains 2,657 place records. 1,522 have a non-null parsed-floor field, a stored count that includes zeroes. In the profile above, positive values sit on the vertical axis; the selected zeroes carry a ? marker and blank values stay unknown. These address-derived values describe the source text, not measured heights or current occupancy.
A data portrait
Places of worship, floor by floor
Floor stated in address
Click or tap any tower to see the places it holds, their floors and their religions.
Religion labels in the source
By the floor
Within 20 m, the data group nearby points into 376 clusters containing two or more sites; 128 contain at least three, and 95 include more than one religion. These are proximity groups from geocoded coordinates, not confirmed buildings, shared addresses, tenants, or shared worship.
Click or tap any tower in the skyline above to reveal how many places it holds, on which floors and in which religions. Click a group card to list its records.
Share of sites with a parseable floor; median floor at right.
The sacred city as a tower: each floor is a bar centred on the spine, as wide as the square root of the number of sites on it, divided by religion. The ground floor sits at the base.
Street sections and urban layers
A section is the drawing an architect makes by cutting a street lengthwise and looking sideways at everything along it. Drawn from the Lands Department's building footprints, which carry base and roof heights above Principal Datum for every block, the two sections here show the buildings on both sides of a street as measured rectangles, and the atlas's sites and the register's temples as marks on those buildings at the floors their addresses state. Nathan Road runs 2.2 km from Salisbury Road to Waterloo Road, level, with forty-one atlas sites along it, a mosque at the pavement and Baptist congregations on the twentieth and twenty-first floors of one tower. Tai Ping Shan Street climbs 40 m in under 500 m, and its temples are all at pavement level, the level the plague clearances of 1895 rebuilt.