Today, Tuesday 5th November, 2013, the roundabout at Bukit Brown was destroyed.

“Now a black bird wings across.

The low sky saw it open its beak. No sound comes.

What were we destroying?”

Too many pausing to question the dusk,

glorious colours drain within their eyes,

forgetting questions it stirred.”

— Chew Kheng Chuan, 1977

5 Nov roundabout (photo Georgina Chin)

“A sense of history is what provides the links to hold together a people who came from the four corners of the earth. Because our history is short and because what is worth preserving from the past are not all that plentiful, we should try to save what is worthwhile from the past from the vandalism of the speculator and the developer, from a government and a bureaucracy which believes that anything that cannot be translated into cold cash is not worth investing in.”
S Rajaratnam, “The Uses and the Abuses of the Past”, Seminar on Adaptive Re-use: Integrating Traditional Areas into the Modern |
Urban Fabric, (Singapore, April 1984)

We made our share of mistakes in Singapore. For example in our rush to rebuild Singapore, we have knocked down many old and quaint Singapore buildings. Then we realized we were destroying a valuable part of our cultural heritage that we were demolishing what tourists found attractive and unique in Singapore. We halted the demolition. Instead, we undertook extensive conservation and restoration of ethnic districts such as Chinatown, Little India and Kampong Glam and of the civic district, with its colonial era buildings: the Empress Place, old British Secretariat, Parliament House, the Supreme Court, the City Hall, the Anglican Cathedral, and the Singapore Cricket Club.

The values of these areas in architectural, cultural and tourism terms cannot be quantified only in dollars and cents.

We were a little late, but fortunately we have retained enough of our history to remind ourselves and tourists of our past. We also set out to support these attractions by offering services of the highest standard.

Lee Kuan Yew, 13 March 1995