Tiong Bahru was built in the 1930s by the Singapore Improvement Trust as the city's first public housing project, and the Streamline Moderne blocks are among the most coherent pieces of architecture in Singapore. The curved facades, the spiral staircases, the tiled archways running beneath the first floors of the residential blocks: it was modest housing built with more care than the city usually gave public infrastructure, and it survived because the blocks were well-made and the community that grew up in them stayed.
The cafes and boutiques arrived in the 2010s. BooksActually, an independent bookshop that has somehow survived in a city not particularly hospitable to them, has been there since 2005 and remains the best bookshop in Singapore. The morning market is the oldest wet market in the neighbourhood and is still primarily a local market, despite the fact that the surrounding streets now attract visitors who have read about the architecture.
What Tiong Bahru offers is the experience of being in a Singapore neighbourhood rather than a Singapore tourist district. The coffee is good. The morning is quiet. The blocks reward walking without a destination.
People who want to experience Singapore as a city of neighbourhoods rather than a city of attractions. Architecture enthusiasts who want to see what the pre-war public housing estate looks like intact. Book people. Anyone who wants a quiet base within reach of the central area that feels different from the hotels and malls that characterise most of the southern corridor.
Not the right choice for families with young children who need a pool hotel. Not the right base for nightlife. Tiong Bahru is a morning-and-afternoon neighbourhood that is largely residential in character, and that is its specific value.
The wet market at the Tiong Bahru Market before eight on a Sunday. BooksActually on Yong Siak Street, the only bookshop in Singapore worth a deliberate trip. The Streamline Moderne residential blocks around Guan Chuan Street and Moh Guan Terrace for the architecture. The hawker stalls on the ground floor of the market building for the chwee kueh (rice flour cakes with preserved turnip) that Singaporeans drive across the city for. Forty Hands on Yong Siak Street for coffee, though the neighbourhood is full of alternatives. Walk the residential blocks slowly and look up.