Civic District & the Singapore River

1. The Fullerton Building

Once the General Post Office — all of Singapore's letters passed through this hall.

Begin at the mouth of the river, in front of a building that used to be the reason everyone came here. The Fullerton opened in 1928 as the General Post Office, and its scale tells you how much mail an entrepôt port generated: a vast sorting hall, chutes down to the quay, and a colonnade of Doric columns facing the water so that the first thing a ship saw was the state. It also housed government offices and, for a time, the Singapore Club upstairs. It is named after Robert Fullerton, the first Governor of the Straits Settlements. The building became a hotel in 2001, and it is now a national monument — which means the columns you are standing under are protected, while the hall behind them has been a lobby for two decades.

The lobby is open to anyone who walks in, and the scale of the old sorting hall is best understood from inside. The waterfront promenade in front is the start of a continuous walk along the river.

2. Cavenagh Bridge

A sign still forbids cattle and any vehicle over three hundredweight.

This is the oldest bridge across the Singapore River still standing in its original form, opened in 1869 and built the way a colonial bridge was built: designed in Britain, cast in Glasgow, shipped out in pieces and bolted together here by Indian convict labour. At each end there is a police notice, kept for its own sake now, forbidding the passage of cattle and horses and of any vehicle weighing more than three hundredweight — roughly 150 kilograms. It was a real rule; the suspension structure could not take loaded bullock carts. The bridge stopped carrying traffic when the Anderson Bridge opened downstream in 1910, and it has been a footbridge ever since. That accident of redundancy is why it survives intact while its busier neighbours were widened and rebuilt.

3. Asian Civilisations Museum (Empress Place)

A government office turned into a museum about trade — in the building trade paid for.

Empress Place Building went up in the 1860s as a courthouse and then spent a century as government offices — immigration, registry, the machinery of administering a port. Since 2003 it has held the Asian Civilisations Museum, and the collection is organised around exactly what this waterfront was for: trade. The centrepiece is the Tang Shipwreck — a ninth-century Arab dhow found off Indonesia carrying some sixty thousand pieces of Chinese ceramics, the oldest and largest single cargo of its kind ever recovered. It is the clearest physical evidence that this sea route was running a thousand years before Raffles arrived. That is the argument the museum makes, and it is worth carrying through the rest of this walk: the colonial buildings around you are a late chapter, not the first one.

The Tang Shipwreck gallery is on the ground floor and takes about twenty minutes on its own. The riverside terrace outside is free and open, with the best low view of the water.

4. Boat Quay

Bumboats, godowns and coolies — the working river, now a row of restaurants.

This curve of the river was the port before there were container terminals. Cargo came ashore from lighters called bumboats, was carried by hand into godowns — warehouses — and the shophouses above them held the traders who bought and sold it. The bend is said to resemble the belly of a carp, which in Chinese belief brings prosperity, and it was the busiest stretch of the river for well over a century. By the 1970s the water was badly polluted and the trade had moved downstream; a decade-long clean-up cleared the lighters out entirely. What is left is the shape and the shophouses. The row is restaurants and bars now, which is a fair trade for a river you can stand beside — but read the buildings rather than the awnings: narrow fronts, deep plans, upper floors with shutters, all of it designed around moving goods from a boat to a room.

Touts work this row in the evening; prices are on the boards and there is no need to be walked to a table. The opposite bank gives the better photograph of the shophouse row.

5. Raffles' Landing Site

A white copy of a bronze statue, on a spot chosen later.

The white figure marks where Stamford Raffles is said to have stepped ashore in January 1819. Two things about it are worth knowing. First, it is a copy. The original bronze, cast in 1887, stands a short walk from here in front of the Victoria Theatre; this polymarble version was put on the riverbank in 1972 to give the landing site a monument. Second, the exact spot is a reconstruction — the shoreline has moved with reclamation, and the location is a considered guess rather than a record. What it does mark accurately is a decision. Raffles was looking for a harbour to break Dutch control of the straits, and he chose a river mouth with a settlement already on it, ruled by a temenggong under the Johor sultanate. The treaty that followed, and the town plan four years later, are why the rest of this walk looks the way it does.

6. Victoria Theatre & Concert Hall

Two buildings, one clock tower — and the original Raffles statue out front.

This is one address and two buildings. The Town Hall on the left opened in 1862; the Victoria Memorial Hall on the right was added in 1905 in memory of the queen, and the clock tower was built to join them. In front stands the 1887 bronze Raffles — the original, of which the white figure by the river is a copy. During the Japanese occupation it was removed to a museum, and it came back afterwards. The halls have been the city's main concert and theatre venue for most of their life, and they still are; the Singapore Symphony Orchestra plays in the Concert Hall. It is also where the People's Action Party was inaugurated in 1954 — so the building sits on both sides of the transition from colony to republic, which is a fairly Singaporean thing for a building to do.

7. National Gallery (former Supreme Court & City Hall)

The Japanese surrendered in one of these rooms. Independence was declared from these steps.

Two of the heaviest buildings in Singapore, joined in 2015 by a canopy and turned into an art museum. City Hall, completed in 1929, is the one with the long row of Corinthian columns. In September 1945 the Japanese surrender of Singapore was signed in its chamber; in the years after, the steps in front were where crowds gathered for the announcements that carried the country from colony to self-government to independence. Behind it, the former Supreme Court of 1939 is the one with the dome — the last classical public building the colonial government put up, finished as the empire that ordered it was about to lose the region for three and a half years. The National Gallery inside holds the largest public collection of Southeast Asian modern art. You can walk the linking atrium and the rooftop without a ticket, and the view from the roof takes in everything you have walked past.

The atrium, the rooftop garden and the ground-floor concourse are free; only the galleries are ticketed. Go up to the roof even if you do nothing else here.

8. St Andrew's Cathedral

White as bone — and the plaster recipe involved eggs, sugar and coconut husk.

The walk ends at the Anglican cathedral, and the thing to notice is the surface. The walls are finished in Madras chunam, a plaster made from shell lime, egg white, sugar and coconut husk, polished with rock crystal until it shines. It is why the building is that particular dead white, and why it has held its finish in a climate that eats most renders. The present cathedral was built between 1856 and 1861 by Indian convict labour — the same workforce that bolted together Cavenagh Bridge. An earlier church on the site had been struck by lightning twice and was taken down. During the fall of Singapore in February 1942 the cathedral was used as an emergency hospital, with the nave laid out with casualties. It is an active cathedral today, and the lawn around it is one of the few places in this district where nothing is asking you to do anything.

Open to visitors most of the day outside services. Dress is not strict here but quiet is expected, and the lawn is a good place to sit before you take the MRT from City Hall station next door.