Battlebox

Under the wedding photos and picnic blankets of Fort Canning, there is a bunker.

The Battlebox is worth an hour if you have any interest in how Singapore fell in 1942, and it is the best use of Fort Canning Hill that doesn't involve a picnic blanket. It suits history buffs, older children and anyone who likes their museums close and a little claustrophobic. The compromises: slots are limited and bookings can't be changed or refunded, it isn't wheelchair accessible and there are no toilets inside. Book a morning slot on the Battlebox's own website and check the date twice.

Under the concerts and the photogenic tree tunnel, almost 30 feet down, is a reinforced-concrete bunker with metre-thick walls. It was built between 1936 and 1939 as the combined operations headquarters for Malaya Command: rooms for signals, cipher work, a telephone exchange and sleeping quarters. By 1941 it was already thought too small, and a new headquarters went up at Sime Road. When that had to be abandoned during the fighting, Lieutenant-General Percival moved back underground on 11 February 1942, and some 500 officers and men squeezed in under Japanese shelling. On the morning of 15 February he and his senior commanders met here and agreed there was no water and no counter-attack left. Later that day he met Yamashita at the Ford factory on Upper Bukit Timah Road and surrendered.

The bunker had a strange afterlife. It was sealed in the late 1960s, its location was effectively forgotten, and a journalist rediscovered it in 1988. It opened as a museum on 15 February 1997, closed, and has since reopened under a new operator, Global Cultural Alliance, with an advisory team that includes one of the people who set up the original museum. The operator calls it the only WWII bunker in Singapore still operating, now as a historic site.

Inside, you follow a corridor of rooms: the telephone exchange with its mannequin operator, the cipher office where messages were coded and decoded, the fortress plotting room where aircraft were tracked, the engine room and air filtration plant, and an escape hatch to the field by Fort Gate. The climax is the conference room, with a diorama of the officers at the table.

There are two ways in. The Basic Experience is free, with limited slots each hour. The Enhanced Experience is paid (rates are in the box, with lower prices for Singaporeans and PRs) and adds a 40-minute audio tour on your own phone, two 270-degree projection rooms and souvenir 3D glasses. We would pay for the Enhanced version, because the audio tour is what turns a row of rooms into the story above. Children 12 and under must come with an adult. Bring earphones, and use the toilet before you go down.

How to do it well: book a morning slot, allow about an hour and walk up from Dhoby Ghaut MRT, about eight minutes away. Then come back up into the daylight and look at the hill differently.

Good to know At 2 Cox Terrace in Fort Canning Park, about eight minutes' walk from Dhoby Ghaut MRT. Open Tuesday to Sunday, including public holidays, 10am–6pm (last entry 5pm); closed Mondays. Free Basic tickets can be reserved only through the Battlebox website, and bookings can't be changed or refunded.

Battlebox | 2 Cox Terrace, Fort Canning Park, Singapore 179622 | Nearest MRT: Dhoby Ghaut, Fort Canning