Singapore Heritage Streets

This app allows you to look up old streets/places of Singapore and learn about their origins and colloquial names. The search on colloquial names are mainly based on Chinese dialects, pinyin and Hanzi, as well as Malay and romanized Tamil for selected streets.

You'll find out when the old streets/places first appeared in official records, and how they got their names.

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.