17 August 2025 · Punggol · 7.3 km · 105 min · 32°C, no shade until the waterway

A New Town Is a Grammar

Punggol is forty minutes and one world from Toa Payoh. I went to read it rather than to like it, and ended up doing both, unevenly.

Every HDB town is built on the same three-level structure: a town centre with the mall, the bus interchange and the station; neighbourhood centres serving a few thousand flats each with the supermarket, the clinic and the coffee shop; and below that the precinct — a few hundred flats around a pavilion and a playground. Once you know the grammar, an unfamiliar town is legible on sight. You can stand at a bus stop in a place you have never been and say with confidence which direction the supermarket is.

What the new towns do differently

Punggol was replanned in the late 1990s as a waterfront town and rebooted again in the 2000s. The LRT loops, which the older towns do not have, give it a distinctive shape: the station names run in a circle and the blocks are hung off that circle like fruit. In the middle is a 4.2 km artificial waterway, opened in 2011, with housing turned to face it.

The cost of the newer grammar is that the ground floors are less generous. Precinct pavilions are lovely and small. The deep open void decks of the 1970s, the ones that can hold a wedding of three hundred people, are not really being built any more, and I notice their absence the way you notice a missing tooth.

The walk itself

7.3 km, 105 minutes, and for the first hour almost no shade at all — new trees are the one thing planning cannot accelerate. The waterway at the end was worth it: wind off the water, cyclists, a man teaching a very small child to use a scooter with the seriousness of a driving instructor.

Back on the train by four. Toa Payoh was designed as a sentence too; it has just had fifty years of people arguing with the punctuation.