There is a certain charm about the utilitarian, red-brick faced ‘A’ power station at Pasir Panjang. Comparable in appearance to the much-loved and now lost National Library at Stamford Road, the former station stands in relative obscurity in a neglected corner of Singapore.

Pasir Panjang ‘A’ Power Station. Commissioned in 1953, it was Singapore’s second power station. Decommisisoned in the early 1980s, it lost its two iconic 235 foot high chimneys in the 1990s.

‘A’ station, completed in 1952-53, acquired the designation ‘A’ when a second or ‘B’ station was added just adjacent to it in 1965. Built at a time when such red-brick faced constructions seemed the fashion, it is evocative of an age at which the foundations for Singapore’s huge transformation were being laid. The elegance that ‘A’ station wears, one that seems to be missing in the form of its nearby and more modern counterpart, belies the fact that the station had been built in desperate circumstances. At the point of its opening, Singapore’s second station, constructed almost three decades after the first, was badly needed due to an acute shortage in electricity supply. St. James, Singapore’s first power station, which had been built with an initial capacity of 2 MW in 1926., was producing a maximum of 37 MW by 1948 (see also Electricity in Singapore). However, by 1950, maximum demand stood at 43.5 MW, and with the supply clearly insufficient, load shedding was introduced. This affected one-third of the electrical consumers in the municipality turned city each night.

The red brick power station and its two 235 feet high chimneys in the early days of the station (online at https://roots.sg/).

‘A’ power station was opened by Governor Sir John Nicoll on 3 July 1953 to great promise. Two of the intended six 25 MW turbo-alternators had been commissioned by then. More were to be added and by 1958, it had reached it intended output of 150 MW – a number that was thought at the planning stage to be sufficient to meet power supply requirements for 20 years. In that time, 260 substations were also built, some 230 kilometres of 22kV distribution cables laid (there also was an upgrade from a 6.6 kV transmission system to a 22 kV one) and 34,700 consumers added. Bulk supply could also provided to Johor Bahru. Power supplied by the station also helped launch Singapore’s big industrial push in the 1960s. With demand already reaching 105.7 MW in at the point of the commissioning of the sixth alternator, an additional 25 kW was added to Pasir Panjang ‘A’ station’s capacity in 1962. With demand increasing,  the construction of a new station, the ‘B’ station, commenced soon after  in 1963.

The former Pasir Panjang ‘B’ Power Station, which was opened in October 1965.

‘B’ station opened with an initial capacity of 120 MW in October 1965, half of its planned capacity of 240 MW. Even this would not be enough to fuel the rapid growth in demand and a new 240 MW power station in Jurong Industrial Estate had to be planned for as the ‘B’ station was taking shape. The commissioning of ‘B’ Station also allowed electrical power supplied to the island of Pulau Bukom from November 1965. Power on the island, where Shell commissioned Singapore’s first refinery in the early 1960s, had to be drawn from the island’s own generating plant prior to this. The opening of the ‘B’ station also saw the transmission system upgraded to 66kV with the existing 22 kV system relegated to a sub-transmission system (the current high voltage transmission network, introduced in 1976, distributes electricity at 230 kV).

Inside the Turbine Hall of the ‘A’ power station (online at National Archives of Singapore Online).

The death knell for the stations was sounded in the late 1970s with more advanced, higher capacity, and cleaner (one common complaint was of soot falling from the sky in the area) power stations such as Senoko and Pulau Seraya being built. ‘A’ station was decommissioned in mid-1980 and ‘B’ in the late 1990s. The stations’ buildings were re-purposed following their decommissioning and are still standing today sans their iconic chimneys. While ‘A’ station is now left vacant, ‘B’ station’s main building is currently in use as the Pasir Panjang District Office of SP PowerGrid Ltd. It is not known what the future holds for the two sets of buildings as the only thing that the URA Master Plan tells us, is that the stations sit on a “reserve site”.

Related:

• Parting Glances : Pasir Panjang Power Station Quarters
• Former PasirPanjang Power Station (MyCommunity)
• An album on Flickr

Note: My visit to the former Pasir Panjang Power Station was made with the kind permission of the Singapore Land Authority.

The abandoned Pasir Panjang ‘A’ Power Station

The cleared out Turbine Hall.

Tall steel columns of the Turbine Hall – part of the metal skeleton of the building.

Reflections on the Turbine Hall.

The building has a generous amount of windows to allow natural light in.

Space under the platform of the Turbine Hall.

Reflections of the skylight in the Turbine Hall.

A steel beam, marked with its origin.

Electricity was distributed at 6. 6 kV before Pasir Panjang was built, when high-voltage transmission was done at 22 kV. The Pasir Panjang generators produced electricity at distribution voltage, and this be fed directly into the transmission network.

Transmission was switched to a higher voltage of 66 kV when the ‘B’ station was completed in 1965 and the 22 kV transmission network was used as a sub-distribution system.

Colour coded fire hydrant.

Stairway to the platform level.

The Boiler Hall.

Steel columns on the platform level.

Another view of the platform level.

Bracing on the steel framework.

Storage tanks for the power station’s oil fired boilers.

A weighbridge.

A last look at the Turbine Hall.

Some ‘B’ station facilities

‘B’ station’s pump house – the cooling plant, originally supplied by Mather and Platt Ltd, could supply 50,000 gallons of water a minute.

Inside the pump house.

Inside the pump house.

The added capacity of the ‘B’ power station permitted the supply of power to Pulau Bukom in Nov 1965. The commissioning to the ‘B’ power station also saw a shift to a 66 kV high voltage distribution network with the 22 kV network relegated to a sub-transmission system.

A room inside the chlorine handling facility.

Inside the chlorine handling facility.

Electricity in Singapore

The use of electricity for the purposes of lighting in Singapore goes back to 1897 when the Tanjong Pagar Dock company introduced electric lighting to its machine shops. It would be some years before the Municipality would adopt electric street lighting, which was introduced to Raffles Place, North Bridge Road and Boat Quay in 1906. This move coincided with the installation of a generator by the Singapore Tramways Company (later Singapore Traction Company) at MacKenzie Road for the purposes of powering its electric trams. Excess electricity distributed via a 460 V D.C. three-wire network, was sold in bulk to the Municipality, who in turn also sold electricity to some 42 consumers. This grew to 110 consumers in the first year and expanded rapidly thereafter.

The generating station at Singapore Tramways Company’s MacKenzie Road depot.

This arrangement went on for some 20 years, with supply also provided by the Singapore Harbour Board from 1924, until the coal fired St. James Power Station was built in 1926. The construction of the station were on the recommendations of a commission appointed by the Municipal Commission. The site at the promontory at St. James was selected due to its location by the coast as well as its proximity to the railway line, which ran to Pasir Panjang. This allowed the coal required to fire the station’s boilers to be delivered either by sea or by rail.

I miss the old Orchard Road. Laid back, when compared to the madness that now consumes the street, little remains of it except for a few memories and some precious photographs, which when they crop up are like postcards sent from the past.

One photograph that I was quite excited to come across is the one below. A scan that a new found friend kindly permitted me to scan, it is a rare shot taken inside Fitzpatrick’s supermarket in the very early 1970s, just as I remember it. The scene, complete with the inside ends of the checkout aisles and the cigarette display racks, brought back an instant recall of a place, its smell and of the brown paper bags the shopping would be packed into. I remember the latter especially well and a time when plastic bags, now a scourge to the environmental, were much less used widely used. Much was also reused and recycled such as the cartons that one picked up from a pile on the left after the checkouts that the shopping, particularly the heavier items were sometimes packed into.

Another postcard from the past: a view over the Killiney Road and River Valley area in the early 1970s. What can quite clearly be made out is Killiney Road, Dublin Road, Lloyd Road, Tiverton Lane and Devonshire Road at the bottom of the picture. Some of the buildings that are identifiable in the foreground include the old Killiney Road Market (from its roof), Mitre Hotel, and if you look hard enough, the roof of 38 Oxley Road!

What this postcard brings to mind is in fact 38 Oxley Road, which has been very much in the news of late. I was first made aware of it being the house of the then Prime Minister from the backseat of the car of a neighbour, Uncle Singh. We were in the vicinity one evening and Uncle Singh decided to drive through the short stretch of Oxley Road (that was before entry to the stretch was restricted to residents) just to show his son and me where the Prime Minister lived, pointing the Gurkha guards manning the sentry posts out as he drove past. This would have been sometime in 1969 or 1970 as I was in kindergarten then. What I don’t recall was why we were in the area (we were living in Toa Payoh), or what I was doing in his car. I do remember the car, an old and rather beat up Austin Cambridge, which had a corroded floorboard and torn PVC upholstery on its backseat – so much so that the coconut husk used for the filling of its cushion was showing through.

So, there is will no longer be a need to make a trip across the Causeway (or the Second Link) to satisfy one’s craving for root beer and Coney Dogs come 2018 if this report on Yahoo Lifestyle Singapore on the return of A&W is to be believed. The first fast food restaurant to set up shop here – a little more than a decade before McDonald’s took Singapore by storm, it made an exit after 35 years in 2003. Its first outlet, modelled after a Wild, Wild West style salon, opened at MSA (later SIA) Building in 1968. That was followed by its somewhat iconic drive-in over the canal and along what became known as the “Floral Mile” at Dunearn Road in 1970.

We miss A&W Root Beers served in chilled mugs here in Singapore.

It was through a visit to the drive-in in the early 1970s that I got my introduction to American style fast food, served in typical American drive-in style at the Dunearn Road outlet. That was a treat. A meal of burgers, fries and root beer was relatively expensive in days when one could get a hawker meal for a little more than a dollar. I wouldn’t become a regular visitor to A&W until I was in Secondary school. That was only because Tuesdays, days on which technical lessons at McNair Road in the mornings required me to have lunch out, were also Coney Days when Coney Dogs went for a steal. This made the visits a lot more affaordable.

The A&W Restaurant I frequented during my schooldays at Dhoby Ghaut (Alison Emery on Facebook).

A&W first appeared in the region way back in 1963 with an outlet at Jalan Tuanku Abdul Rahman in Kuala Lumpur. That was followed by a drive-in – the first in the region at Taman Jaya in Petaling Jaya in 1967 (which is still in operation, albeit no longer as a drive-in). The drive-in in Singapore closed in 1986, when it made way for a canal widening exercise. The chain in Singapore, despite an expansion exercise in the 1980s, was not able to compete with the big names in fast-food and in 2001, closed seven of its twelve outlets when the last franchise holder in Singapore, KUB Holdings of Malaysia, took over. Huge losses, estimated at 1.5 million dollars, saw to the complete pullout of A&W in 2003. Its last outlet was the one at the airport. More on A&W and its first drive-in can be found at The first drive-in in Malaysia and Singapore.

The drive-in at Dunearn Road.

The first drive-in in the region at Taman Jaya in Petaling Jaya.

The  Taman Jaya outlet in more recent times.

Several screen-grabs  from a wonderful video montage put up by the Huntley Film Archives of that Singapore that has been taken away from us – a Singapore I called home. The video montage can also be found below.

Surprising as it may seem, places that go back more than a hundred years are not uncommon in the midst of urban Singapore’s gleaming modernity. Not unexpectedly, many of these places hide a story or two, stories that relate to their history, and also ones that speak of Singapore’s linkages with the wider world. Here is a pick of ten such places with rather interesting tales to tell:

(1) The pagoda supported by eight “dimwits” 

Telok Ayer Street, a landing point for early immigrants in days when the sea washed up to it, is littered with the reminders of the forgotten days of adventure. The street is dotted with religious structures aplenty. Now reconstructions of the simple prayer houses put up by those whom came from distant lands so as to permit thanks to be offered to their gods for the safe passage, they offer insights into the origins of some of modern Singapore’s early settlers.

A cluster of Chinese structures from the mid 19th century, with two well ornamented pagodas, is found in the middle section of the street. The structures, which display the distinctive Minnan style of architecture, tell us of two waves of Hokkien settlers not just to Singapore but also to the region.

One of the pagodas is the Chung-Wen pagoda. Built initially for the worship of the god of literature, and used later as a school, it displays a little noticed but a rather interesting ornamental feature that was introduced to Minnan architecture during the Tang dynasty that takes the form of craved wooden figures of men with distinctively non-Chinese facial features dressed in colourful robes. The carved figures, appended in a corbel like fashion to the junctions of the beams and columns supporting the topmost tier of the pagoda, appear to be propping the structure up. The pieces, of which eight are found on the pagoda, are referred to in a rather disparaging manner as “dim-witted foreigners” in the vernacular. They have no structural function and are apparently a fairly commonly used decorative element in Minnan architecture. Rather than being an attempt to belittle, they are thought instead to have been a commemoration of the efforts of non-native workmen during the Tang period.

More on the Chung-Wen pagoda at : What’s propping a mid 1800s pagoda up on Telok Ayer Street

(2) A mosque with a leaning church steeple

Now fronted by a recently planted grove of gelam or Eucalyptus trees of a type from which Kampong Gelam (or Glam) got its name, is a mosque with an untypical minaret built into its boundary wall, the Hajjah Fatimah Mosque.

While the minaret’s claim to fame may be its tilt of 6 degrees –  for which it is known as the “Leaning Tower of Singapore”, what seems more noticeable is the minaret’s resemblance to a church’s steeple. Strange as it may sound, it may actually have been the steeple of the original St. Andrew’s Church (now the Cathedral) that served as an inspiration. The church  got its steeple in 1842, just a few years before the mosque was built.

Now stabilised, the tilt of the minaret has been attributed to the settlement of the less compact structure of the hand-made bricks employed in its construction. The mosque finds itself in an odd position as a shophouse-lined road, Java Road, once ran along its walls.

More photographs of the mosque and its unique minaret can be found at this link.

(3) A temple with furniture “made in Ngau Che Shui” 

Close-up of characters carved on the table. The Chinese characters ‘牛車水’ indicate that there were furniture craftsmen present in Singapore at a time when a lot of such commissioned work would have been carried out in China.

The Mun San Fook Tuck Chee temple has its roots in the Cantonese and Hakka coolie community who settled around the banks of the Kallang River in the mid-1800s. Many in the community found work in the brick kilns near the village of Sar Kong (or Sand Ridge) and helped established the temple in the 1860s. The term “Mun San” found in the temple’s name, is thought to be a corruption of the Malay word bangsal or shed or workshop and points to the area’s industrial origins.

The temple, which moved to its current premises in the early 1900s, is also a rare example of Cantonese style religious architecture in Singapore. What is perhaps more interestingly, is its furniture. A table used in the temple has the words “牛車水” carved into it, as a mark of its origin. “牛車水”, or ngau-che-shui as it would have been pronounced in Cantonese, translates literally to “Ox-Cart Water” and means “Bullock Water Cart”. This of course is a local reference to what we know today as Chinatown. The table is rather unusual in the sense that such items were then more commonly imported from China and what it does show is that wood craftsmen were then already present in Singapore’s Chinatown.

More on the temple at : On Borrowed Time: Mun San Fook Tuck Chee

(4) The graveyard of the would be successors of the Riau-Lingga Empire

Keramat Bukit Kasita on the slopes of Bukit Purmei, surrounded by block of HDB flats, is quite a curious sight. The old cemetery, with walls that give it an appearance of a fortified compound, has graves dressed both in the yellow of Malay royalty and green of holy men. Although it is quite unlikely, there are those who believe that the graveyard dates back to the 16th century. Even less likely is the claim that one of the graves purportedly belongs to “Sultan Iskandar Shah”.

What seems evident however, is that the oldest tomb goes back to 1721, which is well before Raffles and the British arrived. The cemetery is also known to be the burial place of Sultan Abdul Rahman Muazzam Shah II, who was the very last sultan of Riau-Lingga, the Dutch influenced remnant of the once great Johor-Riau-Lingga empire. Uncooperative, Abdul Rahman II was driven out by the Dutch in 1911 and died a pauper in Singapore in 1930. Several of his descendants are also buried in the cemetery.

More at : A vestige of 16th Century Singapura?

(5) The house of the rising sun

Emily Hill, a villa that dates back to the end of the 19th century, has had quite an eventful past. It has seen its ownership passed from the hands of the Sultan of Siak, first to a dentist and then to the Department of Social Welfare and its occupants include Managing Directors of a trading firm, dentists, the Consul-General of Japan and former prostitutes. In more recent times, the National Arts Council has taken over and it has been used as an arts school as well as a venue for the arts.

With the clutter that has been added to the area in the last 30 to 40 years, it is hard now to imagine that the house actually occupied a prominent position overlooking Middle Road. The road was the heart of a sizeable Japanese community in the early part of the 20th century, and was known as Chuo Dori (or Central Street) to the Japanese. Because of its position, it was chosen by an increasingly militant Japan to serve as a focal point for the community here as the office of its Consul-General in 1939. As the Japanese Consulate, it flew the flag of the rising sun from a position that was almost as lofty as Government House, perched atop nearby Mount Caroline. This continued until 1941 when the Japanese were expelled from Singapore.

Another aspect of the house that few seem to know about, was the misfortune that befell several of its early occupants in the form of a spate of premature deaths in the 1890s. One unfortunate victim was on of the Katz Brothers’s MDs who took up residence there, the 45 year old Mr Heinrich Bock. His death, from a fall off a balcony on 31 May 1896, occurred in rather mysterious circumstances and was ruled by the coroner to be due to “suicide whilst temporarily insane”.

More on Emily Hill at : A Last Reminder of an Old-Fashioned Corner of Singapore

Middle Road when it would have been referred to as Chuo Dori in the 1930s. Osborne House, the Japanese Consulate from 1939 to 1941 can be seen atop Mount Emily, beyond at the northwest end of the street.

(6) The Portuguese Bishop’s Palace

Built in 1912, the 3-storey rectory of St. Joseph’s Church, wears the appearance described as Portuguese Baroque. Intended to provide a parish hall and well as accommodation for the church’s clergymen, the house also has a room on its second floor and a small chapel on the third, reserved for the Roman Catholic Bishop of Macau. The church’s origins was in the Portuguese Mission. Rather uniquely in Singapore, it was a parish first of the diocese of Goa and later of Macau – both of which were Portuguese colonies. As such, the Bishop of Macau, visited regularly as the head of the diocese and this made it a palace of sorts for the Macanese Primate until the church’s links with Macau ceased in 1999 with the former colony’s transfer to China (the anticipation of Macau’s transfer to China saw St. Joseph’s Church transferred to the Archdiocese of Singapore in 1981, although the Bishop of Macau continued to appoint its priests until 1999).

More on Parochial House, as the rectory building is now known, at: A look into the Portuguese Church’s beautiful Parochial House

(7) A final hiding place among the old gravestones 

The Aljunied al-Islamiah Cemetery, is one of two old Muslim cemeteries from the 19th century that straddle “Grave Road” or Jalan Kubor in Kampong Gelam. It’s links go back to the prominent Yemeni-Arab Aljunied family with its patriarch, Syed Omar Ali having been buried on the grounds, which he bought and donated to the community as a burial ground, in 1852. The cemetery is also associated with an incident in December 1972 during which two gunmen at the top of Singapore’s most wanted list, who were brothers, took their own lives after being cornered by the police. This came at a time when gun crime was not uncommon in Singapore and when several gunmen were on the loose. The two brothers involved in this case, Abdul and Mustapha Wahab, were especially daring and trigger-happy and the incident brought to a one-and-a-half month reign of terror to a close.

More on this incident can be found in a previous post: When gunmen roamed the streets of Singapore: a showdown at Jalan Kubor.

(8) A grave that holds the remains of 10,000 fallen soldiers

With graves that date back to 1889, the Japanese Cemetery in Chuan Hoe Avenue counts as one of the oldest un-exhumed non-Muslim burial sites in Singapore. Established by Japanese rubber plantation owners who were also brothel keepers to allow hundreds of karayuki-san (women who came over from impoverished parts of Japan to work in the vice trade in the late 1800s and into the early 1900s), the cemetery has not just the simple headstones marking where these unfortunate women are buried but also the graves of several interesting characters. A charnel containing part of the remains of Singapore’s first Japanese resident, Yamamoto Otokichi or John M. Ottoson, is one. Otokichi had quite an eventful life. He survived a 14 month long ordeal in a drifting wreck of a ship to become the first translator of the bible into Japanese and settled eventually in Singapore.

The cemetery is also linked somehow to Singapore’s darkest of days. Besides being where Field Marshal Count Hisaichi Terauchi, the Supreme Commander of Southern Command of the Japanese Imperial Army during the war, was first buried; the cemetery is also where a grave containing the ashes of 10,000 Japanese soldiers who fell during the war in the Pacific is found. The ashes were moved to the site after the Japanese ritually destroyed a war memorial erected at the top of Bukit Batok at which the ashes were originally placed, the Syonan Chureito, in the days leading up to their surrender.

More on the cemetery at : Voices from a forgotten past.

(9) A church building occupied by Sin

Now occupied by Objectifs, visual arts centre, the oldest building now on Middle Road has distinctively church-like features. Built in the 1870s, it originally housed a Christian Institute before turning into a church, the “Malay Church”, from 1885 to 1929. It has for the longest of time however not been used as a church, housing a restaurant during the war before being used from the 1950s to the 1980s as – of all things – a motor vehicle workshop by the name of Sin Sin!
More on the building: A church once occupied by Sin,

(10) A bridge that was a tomb for over 20 years

Anderson Bridge, completed in 1910 so that Cavenagh Bridge could be replaced, seems to have had quite a gruesome past. Known as the “Bridge of Death” in the 1950s for the spate of deaths from accidents involving motorcyclists, it was also one of several locations at which the heads of beheaded criminals were put on display in the early days of the Japanese Occupation to instill fear in the general population.

The bridge also became a tomb for over two decades from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, without anyone knowing. The skeleton of a man, Mr Ong Choon Lim, was discovered  by a worker carrying out maintenance in February 1987.  Ong, who would have been in his 50s when he died, had last been seen alive by members of his family in 1960. The skeleton was found with two rings, a watch, $9 in currency notes issued prior to 1967, an identity card issued in 1948 and a certificate issued in July 1961. Ong was thought to have died sometime in between 1962 and 1967, which meant that his remains would have lain undiscovered for over 20 years.

The bridge is one of five bridges over the Singapore River that were given conservation status in 2009. More on its conservation: Singapore River Bridges

As with all other places connected with the charming and less pretentious side of Singapore there is little place for in the Singapore version of Utopia our planners seem hellbent on creating, the second-goods bazaar at Sungei Road will become a thing of the past. The bazaar, referred commonly to by the name of the street it was centred on, is more of a gathering of hawkers setting up makeshift stalls and had once a reputation of offering goods that could not be commonly obtained. Rough, unpolished and certainly out of place in the brave new world, it will join the club of the Singapore that we miss come the 11th of July (see: 11 July 2017, the day the thieves of Sungei Road will be executed).

A last reflection on the bazaar.

The bazaar drew the crowds over the weekend, its last weekend of operations. The crowd was especially thick on Sunday as the streets along which it has been allowed to operated, filling with residents and visitors alike in search perhaps of a last bargain, and to get a last glimpse of yet another place being made to disappear. 

The fate of the hawkers post 10 July is quite uncertain. While several licensed ones have taken up stalls allocated to them in several markets,  the scattering of hawkers across several locations will not have the same impact as an entire bazaar dedicated to the trade. There are also those who either have not taken what has been offered or have nowhere to go. Hope for them exists in the form of a temporary solution to their inability to convince the authorities to allow the market to operate at an alternative site. A flyer being distributed over the weekend informs of a move to Golden Mile Tower. An announcement on this (see: post on the Save Sungei Road Market Facebook Page) will apparently be made this evening at 7.30 pm.

It will never be the same of course once the streets around Sungei Road are emptied. In no time there will be little to link the area to this and some of its rather colourful past and what it will surely become is just another piece in a jigsaw puzzle that is of a single shape and colour.

Last reflections, Sungei Road

Displacement.

Registration for the event has closed as of 1800 hours, 14 July 2017, as all slots have been taken up. Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to a gem of a former boarding house scheduled for 12 August 2017 at 4 to 6 pm. More details will be out two weeks before the visit.

There are some gems of spaces and structures that belong to the State. Locked away behind locked gates and with “No Trespassing” signs prominently displayed, they are hidden away from most of us. That is of course for a very good reason, but what it also means is that many will never get to appreciate the beauty found in these spaces and structures. Thanks to the support of the Singapore Land Authority (SLA), the agency under the Ministry of Law that manages State Property, an arrangement has been made to have some of these otherwise secretive sites opened up for a supervised group visit.

The first property that will feature in this series of State Property visits, will be the former Pasir Panjang ‘A’ Power Station on 29 July 2017. The former station building, which is still in excellent condition, features a red-bricked face typical of utilitarian architecture of the era it was built in. It has two spacious halls, supported by frames of steel, are well lit by natural light coming in through the building’s generous openings. Now cleared of its boilers and turbines, it is a joy for a photographer. More about the building and the former station’s history can be found at: Beautiful in its abandonment: the red-brick power station at Pasir Panjang.

Pre-registration will be required for the visit, which is scheduled for 10 am to 12 noon, as there are limited spaces. The visit will also be limited to those of ages 18 and above due to safety considerations.

To register, please visit https://goo.gl/forms/fVfkDckml3CKznBi2.

Registration will close on 22 July 11:59 pm or when the limit for participants has been reached. Do also keep a lookout for visits being organised to other State Property in the weeks and months ahead.

Update
28 July 2017 6.10 pm

Registration for the event has closed as of 1810 hours, 28 July 2017, as all slots for the two tours have been taken up. Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to Old Kallang Airport scheduled for 26 August 2017 at 4 to 6 pm. More details will be out two weeks before the visit.

The former Kinloss House, more recently repurposed as the AXA University Asia Pacific Campus, sits in an exclusive and sprawling 1.9 hectare site at the Lady Hill Road. Thought to have originally been built as a private residence of the then Colonial Engineer Alexander Murray in the early 1900s, the property has undergone several transformations. Over the years, it has seen use as a residence for the Japanese Consul, a British Army officers’ mess, a boarding house for children of Far East based British military personnel, the University of Singapore’s Faculty of Architecture and a Police junior officers’ mess. Beautifully restored when it was turned into the AXA University Asia Pacific Campus, a training centre for the AXA Group, in 2009, the property now sits vacant.

As part of Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets, two 45-minute tours will be run in the afternoon of 12 August 2017. The first tour will be conducted at 4 pm and the second at 5 pm. There is a maximum capacity of 30 participants per tour and registration will be required at:

Registration for Tour 1 (4pm): https://goo.gl/forms/WrKxjB9isGtXKiV22

Registration for Tour 2 (5pm): https://goo.gl/forms/TTEKlGDzFl8Jl9hb2

Registration will close on 5 August at 11:59 pm, or when the limit for participants has been reached. Do also keep a lookout for visits being organised to other State Property in the weeks and months ahead.

The beautifully restored property was repurposed as the AXA University Asia Pacific Campus in 2009 (source: online at HYLA Architects).

Further information:

• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore (Sunday Times, 23 July 2017)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit a Power Station 
• AXA University (HYLA Architects)

Update
11 August 2017 9.15 am

Registration for the event has closed as of 0906 hours, 11 August 2017, as all slots have been taken up. Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to a surprise location being scheduled for 9 September 2017 at 10 am to 12 pm. More details will be out two weeks before the visit.

Old Kallang Airport needs no introduction. Decommissioned since 1955, what remains of Singapore’s very first civil airport has for what seems the longest of time looked out of place right next to Singapore’s very first highway. There is little in what’s left of it that tells us of the part it played in several historical moments including the arrival of a suitably impressed Amelia Earhart in the weeks after it was opened – just weeks before her mysterious disappearance, and also the dawn of the jet age in the few years before it closed. There is a chance to find out a little more of the part the airport – touted as the most modern aerodrome at its opening in June 1937, the part it played in Singapore’s aviation history, and discover some of the lovely spaces that lie within its buildings on 26 August 2017 as part of the third in the series of “Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets” State Property Visits supported by the Singapore Land Authority.

The details of the visit are as follows:

Date : 26 August 2017
Time : 4 pm to 6 pm
Address: 9 Stadium Link Singapore 397750 (Access via Kallang Airport Way)

(Participants should be of age 18 and above)

To register, please visit this link https://goo.gl/forms/4kmmso93L7IvWGFU2

Registration will close on 19 August at 11:59 pm, or when the limit for participants has been reached. Do also keep a lookout for visits being organised to other State Property in the weeks and months ahead.

Further information / previous visits in the series:

• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore (Sunday Times, 23 July 2017)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit a Power Station 
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit Kinloss House

Occupying an area of some 2,400 square metres – the size of ten HDB 4-room flats – the gem of a house at 3 Lady Hill Road is huge by any standards. Set in 1.9 hectares of land that was once part of Scottish merchant Gilbert Angus’ Lady Hill estate, the house is laid out is an untypical fashion and has over the years been put to a variety of uses.

The former Kinloss House today.

Known for much a greater part of its life as Kinloss or Kinloss House, a name that it acquired in the early 1900s, it has in more recent times been referred to as the AXA University Asia Pacific Campus. The French insurer, AXA, having occupied the premises since beautifully refurbishing and renovating it in 2009, vacated it about a month back. The house now empty, wears much of what has gone into it in the last eight years less its furnishings. What will become of it in the future is not yet known.

A meeting room put in by AXA  located in what would have been part of the boarding house’s huge refectory.

Alexander Murray

The origins of Kinloss lies with another Scotsman, the Colonial Engineer Alexander Murray, who is best known perhaps for his work on the design of Victoria Memorial Hall. Murray, a British army engineer who moved from Calcutta, had it built as his private residence in 1903. It is not known what motivated him to name the house Kinloss, but the proximity of the Scottish village to Lady Hill Castle in Elgin could perhaps be a possible explanation. Little is known of the house that Murray built in its early years except for the fact that it became the residence of the Consul of Japan to Singapore in 1909, after Murray’s retirement and return home in 1907, until sometime in the mid-1920s.

What would have been the boarding house’s library.

Much more is certain about the use of Kinloss after the war. The British Military set it up as an Officers’ Mess in the years after, before turning it into a boarding house in 1957. As a boarding house, Kinloss House took in the children of military personnel who were posted to Malaya and also other parts of the region. Singapore had then been where the British Military Education Service had set schools up. The need for a large boarding house, with a capacity of 150 children, was very much due to the increase in postings of personnel “up-country” to deal with the Malayan Emergency. Barrack-like dormitories and sporting facilities – of which evidence still exists – were added to the sprawling grounds for this purpose. This arrangement lasted until 1970 when the property was handed over to the Singapore government for its use as the University of Singapore’s newly established Faculty of Architecture.

Kinloss House during its days as a boarding house (source: http://www.geocities.ws/jkr8m/KINLOSS_house.jpg)).

Subsequent to the faculty’s move to the university’s new Kent Ridge Campus in 1976, Kinloss was transferred into the hands of the Police force to house the Police force’s Junior Officers’ Mess and Police Welfare Unit displaced by the closure in 1979 of Hill Street Police Station. Kinloss also housed several Police units such as the Arms and Explosives Branch. A Police co-operative retail store was also located on the premises. The Police moved from the premises in 2002 when a clubhouse was built at Ah Hood Road.

Participants of one of two tours I recently conducted as part of the Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets series of State Property visits supported by the Singapore Land Authority.

Memories of Kinloss House (by Stephanie Keenan)

I was a boarder at Kinloss House 3 Ladyhill Road Singapore from September 1963 to May 1965.

My family lived ‘up country’ in Kuala Lumpur and the only British Forces run Grammar school was in Singapore, so those who passed their 11+ exam attended there. I remember and enjoyed the train journey from KL to Singapore and back, each end of term, and also (during & after Konfrontasi) the flights on the old Fokker Friendships.

Kinloss House was a well run boarding house with about 150 boarders and a live-in staff of about a dozen adults who were either Army Education Corps teachers or army nurses or local catering staff. The teachers and prefects exerted some strict discipline, but my lasting impression is that it was a happy place.

The former Kinloss House seen from the Nassim Road end.

Those living in Singapore attended the school as day pupils. After the new St Johns School opened in Dover Road, Sept 1964, new boarding houses were built there, and the older boarders went to board there. My fellow boarders were British, Australian, New Zealanders, Gurkhas. Also some Dutch children from Indonesia. We attended school near the Gillman Barracks in the mornings and had the long afternoons to play or take part in various sporting actitvities and then a set ‘prep’ time in the evening to do our homework.

A spiral staircase.

The other boarders lived all over Malaya – some up as far as the East coast somewhere, but mainly from Terendak near Malacca and Penang as well as Taiping and KL, although I think I was the only one from there when I started school. We all have not so fond memories of climbing a steep slope there in the morning and dashing down it in the rain at lunchtimes to catch the buses back to Kinloss. And we often sang on the bus journey back and forth! We got up to all the usual high jinks too like midnight feasts (although we were told NOT to keep food in our rooms due to ants and fruit bats), dorm raids with water and flour bombs, apple pie beds and jumping off the wardrobes onto a pile of mattresses.

The old Alexandra Grammar School became a comprehensive school and was renamed Bourne school in September 1964 when St. John’s opened. The old Alexander Grammar School at Preston Road is still there and is now the International School (ISS). St Johns is also still there and is now the UWCSEA.

Kinloss House

In the main house there were female dormitories and in the grounds, which sloped down in a series of terraces towards a stream, were a series of long barrack type huts which were also dormitories for the boys and older girls, the staff quarters, ‘sick bay’ and store rooms. These huts were demolished in about the 1990s. The remains of the tennis and basketball courts can still be found, now the territory of a monitor lizard and kingfishers.

The main staircase.

The interior of the house has been re-modelled in at least one of its tenancies. When I visited last year even the staircase was in a slightly different configuration. I remember as you entered the main house there was the Junior common room on your left, the refectory hall on your right, a smaller hall ahead of you (where I learned to ballroom dance) with adjoining housemaster’s and matron’s offices. The kitchens and local staff quarters were behind the refectory area and out of bounds to us students.

What would have been the Junior Common Room.

Upstairs, at the top of the stairs was a large open area bounded by a small ‘library’ which was where we did ‘prep’, watched the occasional film, and had weekly dances. Off this were two dormitories further staff quarters, and a small store room where memorably one of the biology teachers once enlightened us with the ‘facts of life’.

The staircase seen from what would have been the library.

Beyond the ‘prep’ area and above the refectory and kitchens were more dormitories clustered around an internal courtyard, which was used for parking. The whole perimeter area was encircled by a high barbed wire fence.

The internal courtyard.

The Kinloss House song (adapted from and sung to the tune ‘Oh Island in the Sun’ ) begins “Oh Kinloss in the sun, given to me by McLevie’s hand. All my days I will sing of hate of that big big house with the barbed wire gate”. Most ex Kinlossites, however, seem to look back on their time there as very happy. We worked hard, played hard, and benefitted from firm and mostly fair discipline.

Another view of the staircase and what would have been the library.

My understanding (via Mr David Anthony, housemaster during my time there) was that the house had been owned by a Mr Tan pre World War II, who had a number of cinemas in Singapore. It was taken over by the Japanese, and then again by the RAF after WWII.

The British High Commission was next door to Kinloss House when I was there. The Commissioner had a daughter Jill Moore who was the same age as me who was apparently lonely and so girls of my age, including me, were invited there for tea from time to time. I went the day after the Rolling Stones had visited and signed my name under theirs in the visitor’s book! When I went for tea Jill’s parents were absent and she was waited on by a tall Sikh servant in imposing turban.

The visit to 3 Lady Hill Road, the second in the ‘Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets’ series of State Property Visits, was made possible with the support by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA). A total of about 60 participants were able to visit the property over two 45-minute tours. Another tour in the series that has been completed was to the former Pasir Panjang ‘A’ Power Station. Future tours include ones to Old Kallang Airport on 26 Aug 2017 (for which no more spaces are available),  a yet to be disclosed location on 9 Sep 2017, and Old Admiralty House on 23 Sep 2017. Links will be posted for registration on a Friday two weeks prior to the respective event – do look out for announcements as to when the links will be posted on this site as well as on Facebook.

Just like the remnants of Robinson Petang flea market at Sungei Road, just a stone’s throw away, the old world Hup Lee kopitiam at Jalan Besar was a reminder of a Singapore that has all but been consigned to the past. Its closing, just this week, just over a month after the decades old flea market was shut for good, is perhaps no surprise; the old coffeeshop’s fortunes were very much tied to the flea market from which it drew quite a fair proportion of its patrons.

Going back to the 1950s, Hup Lee was one of a rare breed of old-world coffee shops in which time seemed to have stood very still. The touch of nostalgia that its provided was a huge draw. An oasis in the desert of modernity that Singapore has become, its closure will be mourned by those for whom Singapore has moved much, much too fast.

See also:

• End nears for old-school coffee shop Hup Lee (The Straits Times 16 Aug 2017)
• Last rites, Sungei Road and the soul of Singapore

The small crowd that gathered at Hup Lee on its last day of business on 21 August 2017.

The last pot of coffee.

Washing up for the last time.

A customer having the very last cup of coffee that was served, as the coffee shop emptied just after 8 pm on Monday.

Closed for business.

A last look.

Gates closed for good.

The morning after.

Update
26 August 2017 8.20 am

A 2nd tour has been added at 1pm on 9 September 2017.

Details on registration will be posted at 1 pm today.

Update
25 August 2017 9.07 am

Registration for the event has been closed as of 0835 hours, 25 August 2017. All slots have been taken up. Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to Old Admiralty House being scheduled for 23 September 2017 at 10 am to 12 pm. More details will be out two weeks before the visit.

The fourth in the series of State Property visits that is being supported by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) will present participants with a rare opportunity to visit the former Changi Hospital.

The details of the visit are as follows:

Date : 9 September 2017
Time : 10 am to 12 noon
Address: 24 Halton Rd Singapore 506997

For this visit, participants will have to be 18 years old and above. For registration, kindly fill the form at this link:

https://goo.gl/forms/Inr83ZS24w0biR7e2 (registration is now closed)

As with other State Property Visits, spaces are limited. Registration is on a first-come-first-served basis and will be closed as soon as available spaces for the visit are taken up. Do register only if you are certain that you are able to make the visit.

Old Changi Hospital

The hospital traces its origins to the Royal Air Force(RAF) Hospital Changi. That was set up in 1947 to serve the then newly established RAF Station, Singapore’s third. The hospital operated out of two Barrack Hill buildings, one of which was actually designated for use as a medical centre in the context of the military camps of today. The buildings were built as part of the Changi garrison’s 1930s vintage Kitchener Barracks, which housed the Royal Engineers. Separated by a flight of 91 steps, it took quite an effort to move from one wing to the other.

Despite its less than ideal layout, the hospital gained a reputation of being one of the best medical facilities in the Far East. It was well liked by those who were warded there with its proximity to the sea. The hospital also played an important role during the Korean War. A ward was set up for use as a stopover for the “Flying Ambulance” service the RAF mounted. The service allowed wounded UN Command troops to be repatriated to their home countries via Singapore and London.

The hospital was also an important maternity hospital that served families with all arms of the military (not just the RAF) who were stationed in Singapore and counted more than 1000 new arrivals during its time as the RAF Hospital. An expansion exercise in 1962 gave the hospital a third block.

RAF Hospital Changi became the ANZUK Military Hospital following the 1971 pullout of British forces, then the UK Military Hospital, the SAF Hospital, and finally Changi Hospital. It closed in 1997 and the buildings have been left empty since. I will be sharing more on the hospital, its buildings and the history of the Changi garrison during the visit.

Update
26 August 2017 1.15 pm

Registration for the 2nd run of the event has been closed as of 1312 hours, 26 August 2017. All slots have been taken up.

Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to Old Admiralty House being scheduled for 23 September 2017 at 10 am to 12 pm. More details will be out two weeks before the visit.

Due to popular demand, a second run of the Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets visit to Old Changi Hospital will be held at 1 pm on 9 September 2017.

To register please fill this form in: https://goo.gl/forms/2a5jttFT7KNM7IdH2

Update
1 September 2017 4.25 pm

Registration for the event has been closed as of 1621 hours, 1 September 2017. All slots have been taken up.

Do look out for the next visit in the series, which will be to the former Central Police Station (Beach Road Police Station) scheduled for 7 October 2017 at 10 am to 12 noon. More details will be released two weeks before the visit.

The fifth visit in the Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets State Property Visits at takes us to the only tenanted property in the series, Old Admiralty House, at 345 Old Nelson Road, Singapore 758692. This visit is supported by Furen International School (FIS), the property’s occupant, and the Singapore Land Authority (SLA).

Visit details
Date: Saturday 16 September 2017
Time: Session 1: 9 to 9.45 am; Session 2: 10 to 10.45 am
Address: 345 Old Nelson Road, Singapore 758692
Participants should be of ages 12 and above.

Registration link for Session 1, 9 to 9.45 am:
https://goo.gl/forms/9Iom36FbbYfsLSFb2

Registration link for Session 2, 10 to 10.45 am:
https://goo.gl/forms/3TGG1oy2ppyyNUMh1

Registrations are on a first-come-first-served basis and will close for each session when all spaces are taken up.

Old Admiralty House, perched atop the last forested hill in Sembawang.

Background to Old Admiralty House

The façade of the lovely Arts and Crafts Movement inspired house.

Built at the end of the 1930s as one of three intended residences for the most senior commanders of the British military’s three arms, the lovely Arts and Crafts styled house sits atop a hill situated at the edge of the Admiralty’s massive Naval Base. Meant to house the Commander of His Majesty’s Naval Establishments in Singapore, it only saw one as resident before the war broke out. It became the residence of the Flag Officer, Malayan Area as ‘Nelson House’ in September 1948 and then the residence of the Commander-in-Chief (C in C), Far East Station, as ‘Admiralty House’ in 1958 until the pullout of British forces in 1971.

Admiralty House become the residence of the Commander of the ANZUK Force post pullout. As part of a visit to ANZUK forces, Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh had lunch at the house during a visit to Singapore in 1972.  As the official residence of the ANZUK forces commander (only two were resident), it became known as ANZUK House. Following the withdrawal of the Australian forces from the ANZUK arrangements in 1975 saw the keys to the house passed to the Singapore government.

Much has happened since the house left the service of the military. It opened as restaurant and guest house in 1978. In 1988, plans were announced to turn the building and its grounds into a country club with a caravan park. This use was however rejected and it was relaunched in mid 1989 as the Admiralty Country House. The house and its grounds would eventually play host to a country club, Yishun Country Club, in 1991. From 2001 to 2006, it became the Karimun Admiralty Country Club, during which time the building was gazetted as a National Monument (in 2002). It is slated to become part of the planned Sembawang Integrated Sports and Community Hub after FIS vacates it in 2020.

More on the history of the house can be found at: An ‘English Country manor’ in Singapore’s north once visited by the Queen.

(See also: Abodes of Singapore’s military history, The Straits Times, 6 October 2016)

Windows into the past.

The real story behind Old Changi Hospital, isn’t about what the place seems to have got an unfortunate reputation more recently for.  The former hospital, which has its roots in the RAF Hospital set up after the war in 1947, is a place that many who were warded or who worked there remember with fondness.

The hospital, with a reputation of being one of the best military medical facilities in the Far East, is also well remembered for the wonderful views its wards provided of the sea and that it was felt aided in rest and recovery.

Members of the public got to learn about the background to the hospital and how some of the basis for the more recently circulated myths are quite clearly false during a visit to the site as part of the Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets series of State Property Visits organised with the support of the Singapore Land Authority. More on the visit and the series can also be found at the links below.

More on the visit:

• A compilation of photos on Facebook
• A wonderful set of sketches executed in double quick time by Pardeep Alva
• The only ghost spotted by participants 

More on Old Changi Hospital / Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets:

• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore (The Straits Times, 23 July 2017)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit a former power station
• On Instagram
• A wander through Old Changi Hospital

Also of interest:

• The first RAF hospital in Singapore

I am reminded of the kelong from the numerous Facebook posts I have been seeing in the last half a day in which the word is used. What comes to mind is not what the word has more recently to describe – a rigged outcome, especially in referring to match-fixing in sports – but of the fishing traps constructed of wooden stakes that once decorated our shores.

What the word tends to be used to describe these days.

There were kelongs aplenty in my childhood and apparently there were even more in the days of hardship that followed the war. This is seen in a postwar map showing locations of food production facilities that also included fishing traps, where a proliferation of such traps can be seen along Singapore’s long coastline.

While it may then have seemed that kelongs – characterised by the long rows of bakau timber stakes rising above the sea surface – must have been a feature of the coastal scenery since time immemorial, the kelong was a technological import that arrived not long after the British did. Spears had apparently been the standard fishing implement that was employed prior to the introduction of the much higher yield kelongs. Munshi Abdullah, in his memoirs Hikayat Abdullah, describes the introduction of the kelong, attributed to a man from Malacca named Haji Mata-mata:

A kelong off Singapore – once a common sight.

Some eight months after the settlement had started the fishing fleet came from Malacca to fish in Singapore waters.

Most commonly caught were dorabs for they were an easy prey, never having been fished with hand-lines before in the whole history of Singapore. The fishermen used to stand out 120 -180 yards from the shore. When the Singapore people saw the Malacca fishermen making much money by hook and line fishing they also began to fish with hook-and-line like the Malacca folk. Previously they had known no method of catching fish other than by spearing them. When the Singapore settlement was a year old there came a certain Malacca man named Haji Mata-mata. He constructed large fish-traps with rows of stakes called belat and kelong. Other people built jermal.

In the first kelong which was put up, off Teluk Ayer, they caught a small number of tenggiri fish; in fact such vast surfeit that the fish could not be eaten and had to be thrown away. Their roes were taken out, put in barrels containing salt, and sold as a regular commodity to ships. The people of Singapore were surprised to see the number of fish caught in this way. The place where they built kelong was at Teluk Ayer Point, near Tanjong Malang. It became well-known.

– Munshi Abdullah in Hikayat Abdullah as translated by A H Hill

A kelong off Singapore (online at https://c2.staticflickr.com/2/1322/5161998843_d5e877ded8_z.jpg).

Another one off Pulau Blakang Mati (now Sentosa) (online at https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1aMnkOWx350/UbjcRtk72kI/AAAAAAAA050/eG_Hiq9ARqk/s1600/1968%2B12%2B22%2BSingapore052.jpg).

Update 22 September 2017

Registrations have close as all available slots have been taken up as of 10.05 am. Do look out for the next visit in the series (location to be advised) on 21 October 2017.

More on the series:

• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore (Sunday Times, 23 July 2017)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit a Power Station 
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit Kinloss House
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit Old Kallang Airport
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Visit Old Changi Hospital (see also: The Real Story behind Old Changi Hospital)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: The house on Admiral’s Hill

The sixth in the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) supported series of guided State Property visits, “Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets“, takes us to the former Beach Road Police Station.

The details of the visit are as follows:
Date : 7 October 2017
Time : 10 am to 12 noon
Address: 99 Beach Road Singapore 189701

The size of the group for the visit is limited to 30 and registrations will be required. To register, kindly fill this form in: https://goo.gl/forms/kDn5piD8NglKGH1W2

Background to the station and barracks:

The station and two barrack buildings were completed in 1934 at the tail end of a decade of reorganisation for the police force. The efforts also saw the establishment of a Police Training School at Thomson – the old Police Academy, as well as the construction of new stations and living quarters across Singapore, in the face of a relative state of disorder that had prompted comparisons between the “cesspool of iniquity” that was Singapore, a.k.a. Sin-galore, and Chicago and Clapham Junction.

The complex was a replacement for an earlier station, which had been located further east along Beach Road at Clyde Terrace and was built at a cost of $319,743. The barracks provided quarters for 64 married man in one of its three storey blocks. 80 single men and NCOs were also accommodated in another three storey singlemen’s block in which a mess and recreation room was also arranged on the ground floor. The three storey main station building, described at the point of its construction as being of a “pretentious type”, also had quarters  – for two European and two “Asiatic” Inspectors – on its second and third levels. Its ground floor contained offices, a guard room, an armoury and a number of stores. A cell block – the lock-up – was also arranged “behind the guardroom”, “approached from it by a covered way”.

The station would play a part in a series of tumultuous events that followed its completion. A hundred or so Japanese “aliens” were held in it at the outbreak of war on 8 December, before they were moved to Changi Prison. This was a scene would repeat itself after Singapore’s fall. The station was used as a holding facility for different ethnic groups of civilians including Jews, individuals of various European backgrounds and nationalities, and also members of the Chinese and Indian community, before internment in Changi.

Beach Road Police Station also found itself in the thick of action during the Maria Hertogh riots in 1950, when policemen from the station were sent to quell disturbances in nearby Kampong Glam – only to have the men involved retreat into the station, along with scores of civilians, for safety.

The station served as the Police ‘C’ Division headquarters until May 1988, when that moved into new premises at Geylang Police Station on Paya Lebar Road. The Central Police Division headquarters moved in to the station in November 1992 and used it until 2001 when that moved into the newly completed Cantonment Police Complex. The decommissioned former station was also used by the Raffles Design Institute for some six years. Two sets of quarters, added on an adjoining piece of land – two four storey blocks in the 1950s and a 12 storey block in 1970 – have since been demolished.

The station complex sits on a 2 hectare reserve site that is now the subject of a Government land sales tender exercise and as the successful developer will have the option of demolishing the two barrack blocks as part of the redevelopment, this may be a last opportunity to see the complex as it is. The main station building itself has been conserved since 2002 and will be retained.

Please note that registration for the event is closed as all spaces made available have been taken up.

The Singapore Land Authority (SLA) has kindly granted permission for a series of guided State Property visits, “Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets”, the seventh of which will be to the former View Road Lodge – best known perhaps for its time as the View Road (Mental) Hospital.

View Road Lodge in January 2011.

As a branch of Woodbridge Hospital (now the Institute of Mental Health) that operated from 1975 to 2001, View Road Hospital was used to house and treat recovering patients from Woodbridge. Many of View Road’s patients were in fact well enough to find work in day jobs outside of the hospital, which also operated a laundry, a cafe and a day-care centre with patients’ help.

Thought to have been completed just prior to the outbreak of war in late 1941, it is also known that the building was put to use as accommodation for Asian policemen (with the Naval Base Police Force) and their families from the end of the 1950s to around 1972. During this time, the Gurdwara Sabha Naval Police – a Sikh temple, operated on the grounds. As View Road Lodge, the building was re-purposed on two occasions as a foreign workers dormitory.

The visit will also include a rare opportunity to have a look at an above ground bomb-shelter that had been constructed as part of the complex in 1941.

Rimau “Bomb-Proof” Office, 1941 (National Archives UK).

The details of the visit are as follows:

Date : 21 October 2017
Time : 10 am to 12 noon
Address: 10 View Road Singapore 757918

Participants should be of age 18 and above.

Kindly register only if you are able to make the visit by filling the form in below.

Registrations will close when the event limit of 30 registrants has been reached or on 14 October 2017 at 2359 hours, whichever comes first.

More on the property : Rooms with more than a view

Further information on the series / highlights of selected visits:

• Guided tours of best kept secrets in S’pore (Sunday Times, 23 July 2017)
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets (LAND – SLA Newsletter, September 2017)
• Old Changi Hospital Visit on 9 September 2017
• Former Beach Road Police Station visit on 7 October 2017

A voice from the former View Road Hospital’s past: an ex-resident Roszelan Mohd Yusof from the days when it was the Naval Base Police Asian Quarters, revisits the units in which he lived from the 1960s up to 1972 (see video below).

Best known as a former mental hospital (used as a rehabilitation centre from 1975 to 2001 for long-term schizophrenia patients as well as to allow them to work, reintegrate and return to society), the building had prior to that been used as a quarters for Asian Naval Base Policemen and their families.

A large proportion of the residents of the quarters were Sikhs and Malays. There was also a Pakistani family, and a Bangladeshi family living there, as well as one Nepali family.  The lower floor of the north wing, which  housed the Chart Depot, was out of bounds to the residents, as well as the observation tower and the bomb-proof office.

The last Naval Base Police Force residents were allowed to vacate their flats in 1972, following the disbandment of the Naval Base Police Force a month after the British Pull-out.  More of what is known on the building’s history is also seen in the video.

More on the former View Road Hospital and the visit that was organised to it:

• Rooms with more than a view
• Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets : Visit to View Road Lodge