Former Ford Factory

Singapore's darkest afternoon happened in a car factory.

Go at the weekend, take the free volunteer-led tour and save your attention for the boardroom. The Former Ford Factory tells the war through one building rather than a hall of cases, which suits anyone who has done the big museums and teenagers studying the period. The compromise is that it sits out on Upper Bukit Timah Road, well away from the Civic District museums, so make it the morning's plan rather than an add-on. Entry is free for Singaporeans, PRs and children six and under; other visitors pay a small fee.

The reason to come is a small room. On 15 February 1942, in the boardroom of Ford's brand-new Art Deco plant, Lieutenant-General Arthur Percival met Lieutenant-General Tomoyuki Yamashita and surrendered Singapore unconditionally. The room holds a replica of the surrender table (the original is at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra), a wartime map of Malaya and a clock set to the time it happened. It is plain, and it lands harder for being so ordinary. Of all the places to lose an empire, a car factory is about the least cinematic.

The building earns its back story. Ford had been in Singapore since 1926, on Anson Road, and moved into this factory, designed by Emile Brizay, in October 1941: its first motorcar assembly plant in South-east Asia. It barely got going. The Royal Air Force commandeered it to assemble fighter planes, the planes left in late January 1942, and on 13 February Japanese troops seized it as Yamashita's temporary headquarters. Under the Occupation, Nissan used it to build military vehicles. Ford got it back in 1947 and stayed until 1980; the rear of the site is now a condominium, and the front was gazetted as a national monument on 15 February 2006.

The permanent exhibition, Surviving the Japanese Occupation: War and Its Legacies, is less about battles than about what ordinary people endured. It has a history of its own: when the revamped gallery opened in 2017 it was briefly called the Syonan Gallery, after the Japanese name for occupied Singapore, and was renamed after public objection. That row is a fair summary of why the place matters. It is about how a city chooses to remember, as much as what happened.

How to do it well: come on a Saturday or Sunday, when the National Archives runs its free tours in English, with Mandarin tours on selected Saturdays; check its site for times before you set out. It is closed on Mondays, and Hume on the Downtown Line is the nearest station. Take the tour, then go back to the boardroom on your own, stand in it a minute longer than feels necessary, and walk out into the traffic on Upper Bukit Timah Road.

Good to know Open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays, at 351 Upper Bukit Timah Road; Hume MRT on the Downtown Line is the nearest station. Free for Singaporeans, PRs and under-sevens, a small fee for other visitors; check corporate.nas.gov.sg for weekend tour times.

Former Ford Factory | 351 Upper Bukit Timah Road, Singapore 588192 | Nearest MRT: Hume