14 June 2026 · Tiong Bahru · Robertson Quay · 5.6 km · 84 min · 29°C, overcast, no rain in the end

Tiong Bahru to the River

The name is a small joke that stopped being funny: tiong is Hokkien for graveyard, bahru is Malay for new. New cemetery. That is what was here before the Singapore Improvement Trust built flats on it between 1936 and 1941.

Those flats are the reason people photograph this estate. Long horizontal balconies with rounded ends, spiral staircases at the back, flat roofs — the style gets called Streamline Moderne, and the blocks look like they are moving even when you are standing still in front of them. They were built for a colonial government's idea of respectable tenants, which is its own story.

At Moh Guan Terrace there is a block with a shelter built into its ground floor: thick walls, baffle entrances, ventilation shafts. It is the only civilian air-raid shelter of its kind still standing inside a housing block in Singapore, and for most of my life it was a storeroom. You can go in now, on guided visits.

I find it hard to walk past. Above it, people are hanging laundry on bamboo poles the way they have for eighty years. Below it is a room built by people who expected to be bombed, and who then were.

Past the market — the 1955 one, rebuilt in 2006, where the queue for chwee kueh at eight on a Saturday is a civic institution — then across Havelock and down to the river.

The Singapore River was an open sewer within living memory. The clean-up ran for ten years from 1977: relocating lighters, pig and duck farms, backyard trades, hawkers; dredging the bed. Robertson Quay's warehouses now hold apartments and restaurants that face the water instead of turning their backs to it, which tells you everything about what the water used to smell like.

5.6 km in 84 minutes, two stops. The sky threatened the whole way and delivered nothing.