On Asian Streets and Public Space

A STREET OF ELUSIVE SIGNIFICANCE

A STREET OF ELUSIVE SIGNIFICANCE WOO PUI LENG HAMILTON ROAD, SINGAPORE A STREET OF ELUSIVE SIGNIFICANCE 01. INTRODUCTION Hamilton Road in Singapore is really not a street of great significance. It is five hundred and fifty feet long, and is located in the Jalan Besar district, a secondary settlement area on the edge of Singapore’s expanding urban core. The buildings on the street consist of seventy-two shophouses and a church. The shophouses, of Neo-Classical and Art-Deco styles, were mostly built in the 1930s. The Holy Trinity Church, of the same era, is eclectic with a large cross and a Chinese pagoda roof. Terminating at a T-junction at Home Road, Hamilton Road has little traffic. It was once titled “a quiet and unknown street” by a Chinese newspaper. [1] On the whole, Hamilton Road would go down in history as an indifferent street. Can we therefore omit it from the study of history? Not quite. One of the most important documents that shaped the city of Singapore was the 1822 Town Plan. Drafted under the close supervision of Sir Stamford Raffles, the plan called for division of the city into separate districts, and a network of streets for the building of shophouses. The shophouses were to have specific widths and heights, and to be linked by covered walkways for the sake of regularity, conformity and weather protection. One hundred years passed before Hamilton Road was laid out according to the Town Plan. Seventy years later, the shophouses were conserved to extend the legacy of this Plan. Many seemingly unimportant events happened on Hamilton Road that were closely linked to its past and its future. It is hard to say to if any isolated event was merely a passing episode or a crucial turning point, but in fact these interlinking events made history. [2] The first objective of this study is to reflect the history of the city by reconstructing the events of a single street. Nothing really distinguishes Hamilton Road from the other streets in the Jalan Besar district. All the streets were laid out at about the same time; the buildings were constructed within a period of twenty years. The district was named after Jalan Besar, the “big road”. Jalan Besar is not particularly striking in appearance but is interesting for its variety of late 19th and early 20th century shophouses. Jalan Besar was the big road to nowhere. It began in 1830s at the Rochor River, passed through a number of nutmeg plantations, and ended in a mangrove swamp. The Jalan Besar district was perhaps best known for its football stadium and notorious for its clandestine brothel activities. Much study of historical facts focuses on key districts in a city. Relatively little is known about the “edge of town”. The second objective of this study is to reconstruct the history of a lesser-known district in Singapore through the mapping of a street. Until the introduction of high-rise and large-parcel development in the 1970s, streets of shophouses largely defined the planning of Singapore. The building of shophouses was synonymous with the growth of the city. Much is known about the architecture of shophouses considered as the city’s built-heritage. Relatively little is known about the development of shophouses as the construction HAMILTON ROAD, SINGAPORE 26 ON ASIAN STREETS AND PUBLIC SPACE FIG 01 JALAN BESAR, c.1900 FIG 02 LAVENDER STREET, c.1900 01 - The Street: Transformation and Modernity This paper has been previously published in Journal of SoutheastAsian Architecture, Vol. 7. Nov. 2004, with the title “A Street of Elusive Significance: Hamilton Road, Singapore”. of a city. The third objective of this study is to understand the urbanisation process by examining the construction of shophouses, the patterns of building, the people who shaped them,and the timing and sequence of construction. Hamilton Road was perhaps only meaningful to the people who experienced it, and to the people whose lives it had affected. For me, that meaning became evident when my mother was evicted from her flat of fifty years in a shophouse that my grandfather built. Hamilton Road can be considered in the eloquent words of Aldo Rossi: “Architecture, attesting to the tastes and attitudes of generations , to public events and private tragedies, to new and old facts, is the fixed stage for human events. The collective and the private, society and the individual, balance and confront one...