Change Alley

In this photograph, two British soldiers in khaki tunic and shorts are leaning over a stall to inspect watches. On an off-duty weekend spree from the Sembawang Barracks, they have come to the Alley to shop for souvenirs and gifts to send home. Next to that photograph is one of the neighbouring Arcade, Singapore’s first indoor shopping mall, a deep shot down its length, and you can see the queue of stores and the shoppers from a not-too-distant past browsing. In the foreground a man is looking at the camera; it is a Semitic face, down-curving hawk nose and deep eyes, dark complexion, his keen gaze somehow still alive, the coin of light at the opening of the Arcade igniting an aura around him. I can hear the shuffle of shoes and sandals, feel the melding of natural and fluorescent light and its ricochet off the glass counters, the polyphonic display of merchandise, and the passage humming with barter and chat.

These framed reproductions decorate the atrium wall of Caltex House, a nondescript tower block erected on the rubble of Change Alley and its adjoining buildings. They have kept the old name, a token of the past to season or flavour the essentially flavourless and characterless present. Nobody pauses to look at the hanging reminders of the past; few remember that this area was the landing stage for Singapore’s history and a launchpad for its meteoric rise into a corporate nation, a high-rise metropolis that remembers very little of what it was like mere decades ago. The photographs are tokens of a past, a sense of belonging and history that nobody seems anxious to reclaim. The smartly attired office crowds stride on to their lofty stations in the glass-and-steel towers, untroubled by how swiftly the changes have come. Change Alley, how fitting a name in retrospect. The name is emblematic of the character of the nation. Change. Singapore has been feverishly reinventing itself, trying on makeover after makeover. The changes started after 1965, slowly, but gathered pace in the 1980s, and accelerated into a mania of demolition and rebuilding in the 1990s. Change Alley survived till 1989; its occupants had been given notice a few years before and awarded paltry compensation.

Now only the name remains. It owes its provenance to Change Alley in London. A few years ago, wandering lost in drizzly London, I came upon the street sign and felt a wave of recognition. I surmised that this was the parent alley. It runs between Lombard and Cornhill Streets. From the arched Lombard entrance it looked like something from an earlier London, quiet, empty, tinged with medieval gloom. In the middle of the alley is a plaque announcing the location of Jonathan’s Coffee House, a congregation point in the 1600s for stockbrokers to trade prices and shares. The alley debouches into the Royal Exchange, the source for the alley’s name.

When I later looked at the entry for Change Alley in Street Names of Singapore by Peter Dunlop, my hunch was confirmed. Dunlop also reveals that the Singapore Change Alley was “where lawyers and commodity dealers conducted their business and there was a sign prohibiting hawking in the alley. It then became a crowded alley of money changers, pickpockets, and small shops catering to the needs of office workers and seamen who landed at Clifford Pier.”

Both alleys were nestled between buildings and served as arterial links between two streets. But that is as far as the parallels go. The mother Change Alley pales in comparison to its Far Eastern avatar. Running between Collyer Quay and Raffles Place, it was a bustling bazaar, a walkway crammed with stalls peddling a range of wares and goods. The roof consisted of zinc sheets nailed to wooden struts, boosted by tarpaulins in places where the metal sagged. When rain poured, there were leaks; a shallow drain running through the thoroughfare served to keep it walkable.

On sunny days, the Alley looked dim, cool, and inviting from the outside. Above the Collyer Quay entrance, it announced itself in English and Chinese. There...