Spaces Of The Dead

In a Singapore inundated with the clutter that urbanization brings, open spaces - wild and green, however transient are always ones to be celebrated. 

Open spaces such as this one on which a former cemetery, Bidadari once stood at Bartley Road/Upper Serangoon Road, are fast being lost to the tide of steel, glass and concrete from which they had served as a respite from - sanctuaries where a much needed sense of space otherwise missing in the clutter and crowds, can be found. 

Masjid Bidadari 

The cemetery was one of Singapore's largest and with burials taking place over six and the half decades from 1907 to 1972, contained as many as 147 000 graves of members across the communities and a mosque, Masjid Bidadari (demolished in 2007). 

Converted into a temporary park after the completion of exhumation in 2006, the grounds, even in its days in which the resting places of the departed decorated the landscape, has been a place to find peace in.

With its days now numbered - a recent announcement by the HDB on plans for its redevelopment as a housing estate has the first developments taking place by this year, there is not much time before the joy it now provides will be lost to the urban world it has for so long resisted. 

The plans put forward by the HDB do show some sensitivity to what the place might once have been or represented, with the cemetery and the greenery it provided not completely forgotten.

Besides the preservation of some of the cemetery's heritage, one promise that the development of the 93 ha. site holds is that a 10 ha. green space which will incorporate a man-made lake - said to be inspired by the famous lake which belong to the Alkaff Lake Gardens we now only see photographs of. 

Alkaff Lake Gardens

Despite it does create a very pleasant environment to live and play in, it will not provide what the space now provides.