The winds of change that are blowing through the area around the area of Bah Soon Pah Road seem to be gathering pace. Long an area in which the march of urbanisation was resisted, it has started to take on the appearance of a site being prepared for the inevitable spread of public housing in Singapore’s relentless quest to overpopulate and overbuild an already overcrowded and overly concretised island nation.
I am thankful that I had the opportunity to have known the area in its previous form. Located off a section of Sembawang Road that I first set eyes on in the early 1970s, it was set for much of the time that I knew it across a green and rolling landscape that in spite of several changes over the course of half a century, has long had that feel of the countryside. Seeing it The many drives that I was taken on and have myself taken over the years brought great joy to me, as did the escapes that I found in the space whenever I took a long walk through it.
As frequent and necessary as change may be in Singapore, it is hard to grow accustomed to it. When change does come, it can often be swift and cruel. Not only does change erase that sense of familiarity one has with a space in the blink of an eye, it can break a bond that one may have developed with the space over a course of several decades. This seems to also be the case with the Bah Soon Pah Road area in the sense of the rather abrupt manner that change is taking place as it is being readied for its next chapter as a residential area.
Named after the illustrious Lim Nee Soon and originally constructed to serve as a access road to a government holiday bungalow, there have been several iterations in Bah Soon Pah Road’s transformation over the years. Besides being closely associated with the Bukit Sembawang estate by virtue of the prominent placed bungalow that served as its assistant plantation manager’s residence, the area also played host to Malaysian military establishments, a field experimental station, rubber plantations and more recently, farms and plant nurseries.
The spread of what will presumably be an extension to Yishun town, extends to the area now occupied by Orto leisure park and Kampung Kampus and several tropical fish farms in the area south of Bah Soon Pah Road by Lorong Chencharu. Based on a Straits Times report published on 7 August 2022, both Orto and Kampung Kampus will have until June 2023 to operate at their current premises. Judging from reactions amongst members of the public to the news, it seems quite clear that spaces such as these are of great value to many. They provide a much needed and location friendly alternative to the cramped, confined, very concrete and rather infuriating leisure and recreational spaces found in malls and integrated complexes in which one can’t seem to escape from the madness that Singapore has become.
Another change that is already altering the face of the area is the construction of the North-South Corridor, a new expressway that will carry traffic from Singapore’s north to the city centre, the northern part of which will be carried on a viaduct up to the Marymount area after which it will run underground. The widening of roads over which the viaduct will run is already being taking place. This is in order to divert traffic onto whilst the viaduct is being built. Preparations for this are well underway along the stretch of Sembawang Road by Bah Soon Pah Road, where the viaduct will run over before it turns toward Lentor Avenue and before long, a road that I knew for half a century will be quite unrecognisable.
One consolation is all of this is that the area to Sembawang Road’s west, the site of Sembawang Air Base, will remain relatively uncluttered. Interestingly, evidence of the air base’s links with the Admiralty, having been develop to serve the fleet air arm, can be found in a few Admiralty land boundary markers placed along Sembawang Road. Hopefully these will survive the construction of the viaduct along Sembawang Road and remain in situ to at least tell the story. The story is part of a greater and more important story of the huge naval base that provided employment and made a significant contribution to the pre-Independence Singapore economy that to this very day has left a mark on the Sembawang area.
Views around Bah Soon Pah Road, mostly from August 2021:
Views around Lorong Chencharu, Orto, Kampung Kampus and Sembawang Road, in August 2022:
The Long and Winding Road 
Hi Jerome. Thanks for another thought provoking post. I totally agree with your sentiments. Living in modern Singapore can be incredibly depressing — almost all the natural beauty and historical buildings are being swept away and covered by mountains of concrete.
My friend, Jennifer Howe, spent much of her childhood in postwar Singapore. Her father was then manager at Bukit Sembawang Rubber Estate and she used to lived at the house now located within a SAF training area.
This was what she wrote to me regarding Khatib Bungalow:0
“But you know, they have got it wrong. Khatib Bungalow was used by the nearby Naval Air Station Simbang to house its officers. In the time that my father was manager of Bukit Sembawang Rubber Estate, Khatib was occupied by Lieutenant Commander Thompson. Their driveway was more or less opposite to the road leading in to the Naval Air station HMS Simbang. We lived a short distance away. The driveway leading up to our house was right at the 11th Milestone — a bit closer to Nee Soon Village. It’s my understanding that ‘our’ house has been demolished to make way for a new highway. There’s a picture of our house below, probably taken shortly before demolition.
I’m glad that Khatib will be preserved. It was a fine old house. I used to take a short cut through the rubber to visit my friend, Susan.”
Her house, of course, had not been demolished. Jennifer was evacuated as a child from Malaya during WW2 to Australia and the family returned to Malaya after the war. She now lives in Canada. She wrote to the Straits Times some years ago about her house as well as Khatib. After her last visit here, I have wanted to visit her house, which is fenced up by SLA, to take some photos for her but have not been able to obtain permission from SLA.
Jennifer’s house is still there for the time being. Khatib Bungalow predates the naval air station and sits on land that was once part of the Bukit Sembawang Estate and later acquired for military use.