Orchard Road

📷: Orchard Road (STB)

When strolling down our glitzy Orchard Road, it’s hard to imagine this place was formerly a dirt road, home to nutmeg plantations, pepper farms and fruit orchards in the early 1820s. The fruit orchards had given the stretch its contemporary name. After the failure of nutmeg plantations from the collapse of nutmeg prices worldwide in the 1840s, Orchard Road began to be developed as a residential area.

By the mid-1800s, various communities including the Chinese, Malays, Indians, Europeans, Arabs and Jews, had settled down in the Orchard Road area, building homes, places of worship, cemeteries, schools and community organisations. At Emerald Hill, for example, a former nutmeg orchard became a residential neighbourhood in the early 1900s. By the 1930s, Emerald Hill consisted of at least 112 houses, 45 of which were occupied by Peranakan families. Cold Storage, the earliest supermarket in Singapore, opened its first retail space on Orchard Road on 24 Mar 1905.

The communities also buried their departed at Orchard Road. Three prominent graveyards were situated along there in the 1840s: a Chinese cemetery located at present-day Ngee Ann City, a Sumatran graveyard behind today’s Concorde Hotel, as well as a Jewish cemetery at the current Dhoby Ghaut MRT Station. The first building to be built on the cleared grounds of the Tai Shan Ting Teochew cemetery was the 10-storey high Ngee Ann Building which opened in 1957. It was unprofitable and reportedly haunted, and was torn down later in 1985 to make way for the new Ngee Ann City.

In 1958, Orchard Road’s first upscale shopping centre – CK Tang department store – opened. From the late 1960s, the Orchard Road area also became a hub for discotheques and nightclubs. Singapore’s first disco, Gina’s A Go Go, had opened at Tanglin Road in 1966. In the 1970s and 1980s, commercial and hotel development along the road intensified. The late 1980s and early 1990s saw continuing major developments with the North-South Line’s Orchard, Somerset and Dhoby Ghaut stations, and Ngee Ann City, then Singapore’s largest shopping centre. In 2007, the Orchard Road pedestrian mall underwent a revamp to enhance the walkability and street experience for visitors. This was followed by new shopping malls such as Orchard Central, ION Orchard, Mandarin Gallery and 313@Somerset, which opened progressively through 2009.

Other prominent memories of Orchard Road include the popular Christmas Light-up which first took place in 1984. There was also the Swing Singapore – a huge street party along Orchard Road in 1988, as well as an outdoor catwalk feature in conjunction with the launch of the Great Singapore Sale campaign in 1994. Going forward, Orchard Road will be enhanced as an urban green corridor with new green spaces, linking the district back to its heritage. Orchard Road will also go beyond being just shopping street to become a lifestyle destination with non-retail experience such as the arts. What still remains is Orchard Road’s identity as a place of fruitful enterprise, ever-evolving with the times, while welcoming the world.

🔗: To find out the next phase of Orchard Road’s evolution, read https://www.ura.gov.sg/Corporate/Error%20Message?aspxerrorpath=/Corporate/Planning/Master-Plan/Regional-Highlights/Central-Area/Orchard-Road

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