Seletar - A Changed Landscape

12th November 2011. Written by Xin Li.
My first visit to Seletar was during my NS days as a trainee in 2008. I remembering see a peaceful, quiet Seletar with colonial era buildings located along this long stretch of road as our bus made its way to the camp.

ASeletar is most well-known for its British air bases that were built around the late 1920s before the war and it has served as a civil airport for a brief period, seeing KLM, Qantas and British Imperial Airways planes landing on its runways for at least 7 years.

Fast forward to year 2011, like how Singapore changed from a “sleeping fishing village” to a “cosmopolitan city”…Within 3 years, Seletar has become a changed landscape as plans were in full swing to turn this sleepy, quaint, beautiful part of Singapore to an Aerospace Park to complement the aerospace activities at Changi. Today the newly renovated airport only operates chartered flights to places like Batam in Indonesia.

There are lots of traffic (human and vehicle) in this rather ulu part of Singapore now due to the massive construction works going on, spoiling the tranquility that once filled this landscape.

The black and white colonial bungalows along the roads branching outwards from Piccadilly Circus are private residences with a mishmash of colonial and resort style architecture with plenty of greenery and some odd looking Buddha head as a garden décor.

This is the area around Sussex Garden, Edgware Road, Maida Vale and Lambeth Walk area occupied by colonial style private residences. It is quite a peaceful place to have a leisurely stroll in the neighborhood.

While it is debatable whether the facelift given to these houses are “authentic”, these houses are a good example of Singapore’s transformed past like what we see in Kampong Glam and Chinatown.

As we walked towards the west of Seletar, we will come to the end of Lambeth Walk only to find the road leading to Baker Street being severed by the newly built Seletar Aerospace Drive.

Here you could see the newly renovated Seletar Airport in the background framed by the remnants of Seletar’s past – the Oval Estate and the abandoned houses of Old Birdcage Walk and Baker Street.

This seemed to be Singapore’s future, just think about the KTM station, the Ayer Rajah Camp, Changi Village and more recently, the Bukit Brown Cemetery. In our land scarce Singapore, it is natural to see such landscapes gone within a flash in the name of urban development.

The fate of Seletar now echoed the fates of Kampong Glam in the past, Kampong Bugis or Kampong Geylang…just to name a few. It might also be the fate of Bukit Brown in the future.

Back to Old Birdcage Walk, behind the two abandoned houses (all of which are nailed shut like a coffin and locked like a bank vault), you see their possible future: newly painted houses slated for commercial or residential uses. One of the newly renovated two-story structures is now an office for Executive Jets Asia.

Located opposite the greenbelt to the west of Baker Street is probably the most intact, recent remnants of Seletar, a cluster of houses forming the Oval Estate.

In here, it seemed like another world within Seletar, the intact gardens and houses and most importantly the serenity of this place only turns out to be a deception approached the houses on the western periphery of estate.

This rather large compound seemed like a club or some sort before it was being cleared out. The structure upstairs seemed to utilize alot of wood, the columns for example are purely wood even though they looked like thick concrete columns.

It even has a Gymasium.

Top: 2 Storey house with black framed sunshades and white wished walls trying to be a Black and White.

Corridors with beautiful lighting.

Wei Xiang at the Oval.

The construction site next door.

The construction next door comes into full view providing us a dramatic setting. You could see the Roll Royce areo engine facility and construction sites through the windows of a house probably dating back to the 1950s or 1920s earliest still surrounded by lush vegetation.

Around Seletar Camp and Piccadilly Circus, it seemed like business as usual. Military personnel, some with their iconic section commander bags and dressed in No.4 continue their daily routine of booking in and booking out amidst this changing landscape.