From pineapple plantations to the military Black and White Houses of Alexandra Park
- Karien van Ditzhuijzen
- Apr 28
- 6 min read
Updated: Apr 30
The quest for the story of the Plantation House at Alexandra Park
A walk around Alexandra Park is like a walk back in time. Strolling its undulating hills dotted with Black and White Houses you can see unrestricted vistas and get an idea of what colonial Singapore used to look like. This makes Alexandra Park one of the most popular estates of Black and White Houses, for tenants and visitors alike. The houses were built for British military officers from the early 20th century onwards and come in different styles, from standard military Black & Whites to transitional styles and tropical art deco.
One house in Alexandra Park stands out in rather a different style to the others. It is usually referred to as ‘The Plantation House’ and it is enveloped with a touch of a mystery that I have been hoping to resolve. What is a plantation house doing in the middle of a military estate? Did it get its name simply from its style, that with its elaborate woodwork and wrap around verandas was one seen commonly in 19th century plantation houses in British Malaya, or was it the house of an actual plantation owner that predates the military camp?
To try and find the answer, I dove into the archives. The British military acquired this area around 1900 to develop Alexandra Barracks, and built wooden barracks for soldiers, houses for officers, an officer’s mess and a rifle range. Any plantation house would therefore be built before that time.
In this map from 1891 the whole area west of Alexandra Road is described as owned by Tan Kim Seng. He was a well-known Straits born Chinese merchant who owned plantations all over Singapore, growing crops like gambier, pepper and nutmeg. He was known to have very large pineapple plantations in the Alexandra Road area, making it likely the area we are looking for was covered with spiky grey pineapple plants in the 19th century.
However, Tan Kim Seng and his descendants lived around River Valley, where the family owned a large compound named Panglima Prang House. In any case, from the style of the house we are more likely looking for a European owner.
This is a map from that according to the archives is from the 1840s, but is more likely from the 1860s. It shows several plots owned by Tan Kim Seng, but also some owned by others, including another well-known Chinese businessman named Seah Eu Chin - though his land is more to the east of Alexandra Road, so not where we are looking for. In the area west of Alexandra Road we see a plot owned by a Brit called Wilsone. Mr Wilsone was born in 1830, and although his land seems to be little further too far north for him to be the owner of our plantation house, to get an idea what kind of people would own land around here, we can find out more about him in the newspaper archives.
Charles Henry Haldane Wilsone was working as a merchant in Singapore and became one of the directors of the Tanjong Pagar Dock company. He was a notable figure in 19th century Singapore. He got married in 1861 in Singapore and died in Scotland in 1882. After his death his estate was handed over to a Mr Stiven, but whether this included the Alexandra land and what it was used for is not clear. Stiven himself left for Europe in 1892. We don't have an address for Wilsone, but he likely lived closer to his main job at the port.
Another crop that was grown around Alexandra Road was coffee, as we see in this newspaper clipping from 1883 that mentions a coffee plantation owned by Syed Massim. Syed Massim was an immensely wealthy Straits Arab who owned a large trading fleet, and like many Arab traders invested in land and real estate in Singapore. Syed Massim got immortalised after novelist Joseph Conrad worked on one of his ships and later featured the Arab trader in his novels. However fascinating his character may be, he won’t likely bring us any closer to revealing more about our planation house.
There were several smaller plantations in the area, some of them run by Europeans, but most owned by traders living and working in the city rather than planters who lived on site. Could one of them have built a plantation house here? If so, it would have been there already in 1900 for some time before the British military bought the land. Let’s look at some maps from a later era to see what we can find.
This map from 1910 is interesting as it has handwritten notes on it from 1926 when drainage was improved at the estate, and it therefore gives us information on two eras. We can see the house on what has now become Russels Road is there already in 1910, making it one of the older houses of the estate, but… it has a very different shape from the current house. Sometimes old maps can be imprecise, but for this map other facts like the location of the racquet and tennis courts correspond neatly with their current position, as does the neighbouring house at 10 Winchester Road, which is still in the exact same shape today as when it was added to this map by hand in 1926. Interesting to note is that initially in 1910 there was a building there in the exact same shape as 6 Russels at that time, which makes it more likely both were military houses built together.
This suggests that our Plantation House would have been either replaced or significantly extended after 1926. The typical woodwork and lattice verandas, which have started the theory that this was a much older house and possibly built by a plantation owner predating the military, seem to have been added after 1926 only. If you look closely at the shape of the roof of the current building, it could be that the original 1910 house is still there but had verandas added on the sides as well as extended outbuildings at the back. The whole side of the house (on the right in the pictures) features a long veranda with at one end steps leading down to a small entry porch in a gothic style. At the other end of this veranda is a small gazebo. The whole interior has open latticework leading to the inner, and possibly oldest, part of the house that could date from before 1910. The whole house, veranda as well as middle portion, is raised on concrete stilts.
If it does not predate the British military camp, why does the ‘Plantation House’ look so very different from the others in Alexandra Park?
On the 1926 we see something else notable: the house is labelled as the ‘Admiralty Bungalow’. Alexandra Park housed army officers, but the navy was based in Sembawang where it’s highest officer lived in Admiralty House. However, in the early 1920s the Admiralty built the Normanton Oil Depot nearby Alexandra, where the earlier Normanton Rifle Range had been, so it is likely this Admiralty Bungalow would have been inhabited by someone overseeing this depot.
Can the different style be explained by this being as the only house in the area not occupied by the army but by the admiralty instead. Perhaps some naval officer had a flair for architecture, or wanted to distinguish his place from his army neighbours?
I started this research to find out who a possible plantation owner could have been that built 6 Russels Road, but ended up with some rather surprising, and to be honest slightly disappointing conclusions. I’d love to find more conclusive evidence of who added the beautiful verandas to the house, and the latticed woodwork that made many speculate this house to be much older than the surrounding military ones. Could this evidence be hidden someone in the archives of the British navy?
Comments