“Driving down an endless road
Taking friends or moving alone
Pleasure at the fairground on the way”

Photographer’s Field Notes:

I have a fascination with old housing estates earmarked for demolition and renewal. Besides being relics from a time passed, they conjure up heavy feelings of nostalgia. In this Dakota Crescent estate, I find myself revisiting over time in hopes to make pictures that encapsulate how it must have felt back when there were still residents living there. These playgrounds, the leafy common gathering spots and compact corridors have so many stories to tell us. I revisited Dakota again some while ago to shoot a bunch of wedding portraits with Marcus & Angelin, to pay homage to a beloved Singapore location. Here are some of my favourite images.

Dakota Crescent (Chinese: 达哥打弯) is one of Singapore’s oldest housing estates built by the now-defunct Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT), the government-run housing development authority before the establishment of the current Housing and Development Board (HDB), in 1958. Today, there are only 15 original blocks from that era which still remain to this day.

For 50 years, an elderly couple used to own and operate a corner provision shop at Block 12. Gentrification came calling with it being sold to take on a new form as a café, also known as Tian Kee & Co. The new owners retained the original signboard to pay homage to old-school nostalgia. The café had ceased operations since December 2016 after Dakota Crescent was earmarked for redevelopment.

The Dove Playground, another significant icon of Dakota Crescent, was designed by Mr Khor Ean Ghee in 1979. Mr Khor had been asked by HDB to come up with play spaces for a new generation of public housing that would “go beyond providing just a roof over Singaporeans’ heads". Even though he had no experience in designing playgrounds, Mr Khor began creating playgrounds based on animals and local icons like rickshaws. 

In this country where old buildings are demolished rapidly for spanking new steel and concrete condos, nostalgia is a luxury that we like to wallow in. Dakota Crescent is as much a Singapore iconic as it is overlooked and I will miss this place dearly.