Bukit Brown, a large tract of land perched just off Lornie Road that is currently being used to house those long passed, will soon be home to a different group of people – the living.
(The Japanese Cemetery Park is one of 60 cemeteries in Singapore. Image courtesy of Singapore Tourism Board.)
The Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) has recently announced that the 86ha graveyard has been designated as an area for housing development. Plans are already in place for a Bukit Brown MRT station as well.
The Bukit Brown cemetery shares the same fate with many others in land-scarce Singapore. One of them is Bidadari at Upper Serangoon Road, which has already been exhumed. Real estate agency ECG Property tells The Straits Times that the areas of Bidadari and Bukit Brown are sitting on “prime spots for housing”.
Currently, there are 60 cemeteries in Singapore; among them, the only one that accepts new burials is the Choa Chu Kang Cemetery. Areas that used to be graveyards include the popular Orchard Road destination Ngee Ann City shopping centre as well as housing estates like Bishan and Tiong Bahru. Exhumed plots of land are usually left alone for a period in time before development works begin. “These places are usually developed after the land has been fallow for some time. People forget they were ever cemeteries,” ECG Property added.
Meanwhile, the 200-member strong Singapore Heritage Society (SHS) has published a book entitled ‘Spaces of the Dead: A Case from the Living’, that documents local cemeteries and strives for their conservation as places of interest, recreation and education. Besides the natural sights and sounds, cemeteries contain the resting places of some prominent figures of olden day Singapore.
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