From pineapple plantations to the military Black and White Houses of Alexandra Park
- Karien van Ditzhuijzen
- Apr 28
- 9 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
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. The whole side of the house 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 house, veranda as well as middle portion, is raised on concrete stilts and it features lots of intricate latticework.
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 which was 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. The survey map below shows us that there was a house on this location in 1905, but the map doesn't give much further information.
The map above from 1910 has much more details, and it also has handwritten notes on it from 1926 when drainage was improved at the estate. We can see our house again in 1910 but… surprisingly, it has a very different shape from the current house.
The 1910 map shows a typical Anglo-Malay-style bungalow with a symmetrical plan, where the two extensions sticking out at the rear of the building are the bathrooms, adjoining two bedrooms in either corner. The outbuildings are separate from the main house.
Sometimes old maps can be imprecise regarding building shapes, but in this map other facts like the location of the racquet and tennis courts correspond neatly with their current position, as does the shape of several other buildings that still exist. The neighbouring house at 10 Winchester Road is still in the exact same shape today as when it was added to this map by hand in 1926. So we know the person(s) who made this map did their work in a precise fashion. What is also interesting to note is that initially in 1910 there was another bungalow up the road 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 this map was made. The typical woodwork and lattice verandas, which have started the theory that this was an older house and possibly built by a plantation owner predating the military, were not there in 1910. My initial thoughts were that they were perhaps added after 1926. As architecture is not my specialty, I consulted Julian Davison, author of the book "Black and White: The Singapore House 1898-1941" who not only specialises in this type of architecture but has also seen the house up close.
Based on the house's architectural details, Julian had earlier dated it around 1900, and he was as surprised as I was to see a map from 1910 with a very different house in its location. However, he feels that to convert a rectangular Anglo-Malay bungalow to the present L-shaped plan with its asymmetrical distribution of rooms would have entailed a major make-over, for which he saw no evidence when he visited the house. He rather suspects that the original house was demolished and a new one built in its place. The design of the house looks carefully planned, in fact, much more carefully planned and designed that one would expect from a simple military bungalow. These is what gave birth to the suspicions this wasn't an army house in the first place. But if it wasn't the army, who then built it? And when?
Though all the detail shown in the map gives us reason to believe the footprints drawn are reliable, both for the original 1910 buildings and those added by hand 1926, one can also imagine that the engineer in 1926 would not have thought to alter the footprint of a new building if it was in the exact same position of a house that had been the already in 1910 - he could have assumed it was the same house and not look any further.
So we only know the house was built after 1910. With my theory that the original 1910 house had been extended debunked, we need to look at other evidence to come up with a new date estimate. One way to date a house is to look at its style. This house has style elements of Arts & Crafts and Gothic Revivalism, which were popular around the turn of the century, which is why Julian initially dated it around that time. He is fairly certain the house can not have been build after the First World War. The end of the great war resulted in a building boom in Singapore, and the new generation of architects in this era were much more up to date with styles and techniques used in Europe. By the 1920s, the Gothic Revival had been out of style for at least half a century, even in Singapore that always lagged a bit behind the fashions. Julian therefore estimates the new house's construction in the early 1910s.
By whom? As mentioned, the Plantation House looks different from the others in Alexandra Park, and seems too well designed to have been made by a simple army contractor.
If not the army, who then? In the 1926 notes on the map we see something notable: the drainage engineer labels the house as the ‘Admiralty Bungalow’. Alexandra Park typically housed army officers rather than the navy, but in the early 1920s the Admiralty built the Normanton Oil Depot nearby Alexandra, where the earlier Normanton Rifle Range had been, so we do know the navy had links to the area. It is possible this Admiralty Bungalow would have been inhabited by someone overseeing this depot.
Let's look at other navy architecture as a comparison: Old Admiralty House, above, was built as the residence for the Commodore Superintendent of the Royal Navy Dockyard in Sembawang in 1939. Though it is a very different and later house, its style was also influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement. The building has been attributed to the famous architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and though there is no evidence whether this is true, the suggestion does imply that the admiralty could have worked with more renowned architects than the army did. If we combine this with Julian Davison's conclusion that the Plantation House is a well designed building rather than the standard Anglo-Malay bungalows that the army had built by standard contractors, it becomes quite plausible the Plantation House was built by the navy rather than the army.
The Royal Navy is also called the 'senior service' because it is the oldest branch of the British Armed Forces, and it was typically a bit more upscale than the army. So if the admiralty built a house, they would want a top architect for the job. Julian Davison thinks it likely the Plantation House was designed by Regent Bidwell, the leading colonial architect of the era. He bases this on the fact that the design and details of the Plantation House share many similarities to the Atbara House (which can still be seen today in the Botanic Gardens), which was designed by Bidwell in 1898. Another house that shares some of these features is the Jointers Quarters at Pender Road , and in my post here you can see images of both buildings.
In the early 1910s, Bidwell was still with the architecture firm Swan & Maclaren, and though these years would mark the end of his illustrious career, we know he designed some prominent buildings like a department store for the Katz brothers in Raffles Place in 1910.
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 initially disappointing conclusions when it seemed the house could not have been built by a plantation owner.
After reviewing all the evidence, I think we can still come to a fairly plausible and not all-together unsatisfying conclusion: that difference in style of the Plantation House compared to the other houses in Alexandra Park is because this was built by the navy rather than the army, and most likely by a trained architect, be it Bidwell or not, rather than a mere contractor or builder.
What we know for sure is that it remains a beautiful house, a fine example of colonial architecture that merges styles from around the world that has made a comfortable home to families for over a century. I'd love to see more conclusive evidence of its architect, the year it was built or by whom it has been inhabited. Could the answer lie in some archives of the Royal Navy? If you know more, please do reach out!
Further reading:
Maps all come form the national archives of Singapore (https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/)
Books:
"Black and White: The Singapore House 1898-1941" by Julian Davison
"Swan & Maclaren : a story of Singapore architecture " by Julian Davison
Photo Admiralty House from:
All other photos by author
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