Discovering Singapore’s Best Kept Secrets: Beach Road Police Station and Barracks

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

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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

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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.

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.

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