23 August 2026 · Toa Payoh · 4.2 km · 68 min · 31°C, thundery showers by five

The Dragon at Lorong 6

I have lived within a kilometre of this dragon my whole life and I still walk past it slowly. It sits at Lorong 6, its body a spine of mosaic tiles, its head a set of rings you can climb through, and underneath it — this is the part that matters — sand.

Most of the sand playgrounds are gone. Rubber matting is easier to maintain and easier to defend when a child falls. The dragon at Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3 has the matting. This one still has sand, which is why people come from the other end of the island to photograph it, and why the uncles who sit at the next block have opinions about those people.

It was built in 1979, one of a family of playgrounds designed in-house at the Housing and Development Board rather than bought from a catalogue. You can tell. Nothing about it is ergonomic. The tiles get hot. The rings are exactly wide enough to be frightening at six years old.

A town that had to work

Toa Payoh is the first town HDB planned and built from nothing, in the 1960s, on land that had been swamp and squatter settlement — toa payoh is Hokkien for big swamp. It had to work, and it had to be seen to work. The athletes of the 1973 South East Asian Peninsular Games were housed in flats here. Foreign visitors were brought to look at the blocks the way you would show someone a new kitchen.

Walking it now, half a century on, the thing I notice is how much space was given to things that earn nothing. The town park with its lookout tower. The wide gap between blocks. The dragon itself, which occupies ground that in a private development would hold eleven parking lots.

Route notes

Out from Blk 190 at six, down Lorong 6 to the dragon, then a loop through the town park before cutting across to the MRT and up to Braddell. 4.2 km, 68 minutes, most of it in shade. The rain came at the tower and I waited it out under the concrete overhang with four other people, none of whom said anything, all of whom left at the same moment when it stopped.

Two boys were on the dragon when I passed on the way back. Neither was using it the way it was designed to be used; one was sitting on the head.