Singapore: The Colonial downtown

Singapore – A City With a Lot to Prove (And, Frankly, It’s Done It)

Before we get to the hawker centres, the spotless pavements and the frankly bewildering efficiency of everything, it’s worth pausing for a moment to understand just how Singapore got to where it is today. Because it didn’t get here by accident, and the story is considerably more dramatic than you might expect from a place where dropping chewing gum is technically an offence.

The island had been a strategically important trading post for centuries before the British turned up with their usual combination of enthusiasm and paperwork. Various sultans, Malay chieftains, and regional powers had fought over it, held it, and lost it again across hundreds of years, all recognising what any half-decent sailor could see: that this small island at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula sat astride some of the most important shipping lanes in the world.

Enter Sir Stamford Raffles. In 1818, he was appointed Lieutenant Governor of the British settlement at Bencoolen, on the southwest coast of Sumatra — a posting that was, by all accounts, not exactly a plum job. But Raffles was ambitious, sharp, and had a rather large bee in his bonnet about the Dutch, who at that point dominated regional trade and were not especially pleased about it. In January 1819, he sailed to Singapore, liked what he saw enormously, and set about signing a treaty with the local Malay ruler, the Temenggong, and later with the newly installed Sultan Hussein Shah. Whether everyone involved fully understood what they were agreeing to is a matter historians have been arguing about ever since.

What is not in dispute is that Singapore grew at a quite extraordinary pace. Within a few years of being established as a British trading post, it had become one of the busiest ports in the region. It was declared a Crown Colony in 1867, by which point it had well and truly cemented its position as the commercial heart of British interests in Southeast Asia. Raffles himself would probably have been insufferably smug about the whole thing had he lived long enough — he died in 1826, aged just 45.

Then came the Second World War, and everything went horribly wrong. The British had considered Singapore virtually impregnable — a fortress, they called it — which makes what happened in February 1942 all the more humiliating. The Japanese forces, having swept down the Malay Peninsula with alarming speed, crossed the Johor Strait and, within a week, accepted the surrender of British Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival. It was, Winston Churchill later wrote, the worst disaster in British military history. Around 85,000 Allied troops became prisoners of war, and the local civilian population endured three and a half brutal years of Japanese occupation. Life, to put it mildly, was extremely grim.

The Japanese surrendered in August 1945, and Singapore returned to British administration, though things would never quite be the same again. The myth of British invincibility had been comprehensively shattered, and the push for self-governance gathered considerable momentum. The British, to their credit — or perhaps simply recognising which way the wind was blowing — began transferring more and more power to locally elected governments through the late 1940s and 1950s.

By 1963, Singapore had joined a new federation alongside Malaya, Sarawak and Sabah, becoming part of what we now know as Malaysia. It lasted almost no time at all. Political tensions, ethnic unrest, and serious disagreements between Singapore’s leadership — principally the formidable Lee Kuan Yew — and the federal government in Kuala Lumpur made the arrangement thoroughly unworkable. There were riots. There was sedition. There was a great deal of very heated arguing. On 9 August 1965, Singapore was unceremoniously ejected from the federation and found itself, rather abruptly, an independent nation with no natural resources, no hinterland, and a population that had just been told they were on their own.

What happened next is, depending on your point of view, either an extraordinary testament to human ingenuity and political will, or a slightly unnerving reminder of what can be achieved when a government really, really means business. Lee Kuan Yew wept on television the day independence was announced. Within a generation, Singapore had become one of the wealthiest, best-organised, and most efficient places on earth. The rest, as they say, is history.

After a couple of days poking around some of the outer neighbourhoods — which were, in themselves, considerably more interesting than we’d expected — we decided it was time to head into the downtown area properly and see what all the fuss was about.

🦁 Exploring Downtown Singapore on Foot (Slowly. Very Slowly.)

We made the entirely sensible decision to explore downtown Singapore on foot. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I should warn you, though — Singapore sits almost bang on the equator, at about 1.3 degrees north to be precise, and the city is hot and ferociously humid every single day of the year, regardless of season, regardless of month, and regardless of how much you wish otherwise. You take half a dozen steps outside and you are immediately, comprehensively drenched in sweat. Not a gentle glow. Not a modest perspiration. A full, honest, embarrassing soaking, as though someone has emptied a bucket over your head while you weren’t looking. The golden rule, therefore, is to drink enormous quantities of water and move at the sort of pace that would make a tortoise impatient.

The downtown area itself is dominated by the towering glass-and-steel skyscrapers of the financial district — a skyline that Singapore has been aggressively constructing since its remarkable transformation from a modest colonial port into one of the world’s great financial centres, a process that accelerated dramatically after independence from Malaysia in 1965. The city-state’s GDP per capita today is among the very highest on the planet, which the architecture makes abundantly clear.

But in the shadow of all that gleaming financial ambition, on the opposite bank of the Singapore River, there is an older world entirely. A row of handsome colonial-era buildings lines the waterfront, most of them dating back to the period of British administration that began in earnest when Sir Stamford Raffles founded the modern settlement in 1819. These solid, pale-fronted structures — built in the neoclassical and Renaissance styles fashionable among British colonial administrators of the 19th century — now serve as government buildings and museums. There is also a genuinely splendid Anglican cathedral nearby, St Andrew’s Cathedral, which was completed in 1862 and remains one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture in the whole of Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, we did not have time to duck inside any of the museums, so we pressed on at our measured, heat-induced shuffle.

We followed the course of the Singapore River down towards the bay, which made for a very pleasant walk despite the ambient sauna conditions. Along the way we passed a cluster of large, reflective silver spheres — the Esplanade Theatres on the Bay, opened in 2002 and locally nicknamed “the Durian” on account of their spiky, domed roof structures, though from where we were standing they looked rather more like a pair of oversized metallic baubles. They sit a little incongruously alongside the colonial grandeur of the riverbank, like someone had left a prop from a science fiction film in the middle of a period drama. We admired them briefly and moved on.

A short while later we reached the mouth of the river where it opens out into Marina Bay, and there, in its proper place of civic pride, stood the Merlion. This rather wonderful piece of national mythology — a creature with the head of a lion and the body of a fish — has been Singapore’s official mascot since 1964, when it was designed by the Travel Corporation of Singapore. The lion’s head references “Singapura,” the Sanskrit name for the island meaning “Lion City,” while the fish body nods to Singapore’s origins as a fishing village known as Temasek. The statue, which stands at just over eight metres tall and weighs an impressive 70 tonnes, was installed on the waterfront in 1972 and spends its days cheerfully shooting a jet of water into the bay, entirely unbothered by the heat