The search for the story of the Plantation House at Alexandra Park at Russels Road - a real old plantation house or military building?

Lately I have been sharing several posts about the houses of Telok Blangah; the palaces of the Temenggong , the colonial Black and White houses built for British colonials and their domestic staff , and those built by a Chinese towkay . But of course, the area wasn’t only inhabited by opulent Malay rulers, wealthy colonials and rich Chinese. Like in any neighbourhood, most of the inhabitants of Telok Blangah would have been middle class or not that well-to-do. In this post I zoom in on a...

When we talk about colonial Black and White Houses in Singapore and their inhabitants, we tend to remember the British families that lived in them. In reality a colonial estate would house many others besides the tuans besar and their families, and they can be roughly divided into two categories: domestic staff and company workers. In this post I want to talk about that first group. You can imagine those large houses with all their timber, like the ones I describe in my previous post on...