Singapore Heritage Streets

This app allows you to lookup old streets of Singapore and learn about their origins and colloquial names in English, Mandarin and dialects. Malay and Tamil colloquial names are also available for certain streets. In the colonial days, Singapore streets were named by the Municipal Councilors, with inputs from government officials and some highly-influential individuals. Local residents were not able to identify with the official names, so they continued to use colloquial names to identify streets, usually based on prominent structures such as a school, a place of worship or a market. Many of these landmarks have vanished, but the streets' colloquial names remain with us, offering glimpses of the streets' histories, the same way that fossils are telling us about the history of Earth.