Museum @ My Queenstown

Singapore's first ground-up community museum was built by about 1,000 volunteers aged 18 to 90. The uncles and aunties had views on where things went.

Museum @ My Queenstown is for former residents, curious families and anyone who wants to see what a Singapore estate looked like before redevelopment, told by the people who lived there. The catch is that it is between homes on our records: the original shop unit in Tanglin Halt closed in July 2022, and a bigger museum at Block 30A Margaret Drive was planned to reopen in 2024. Check My Community's channels to confirm it is open before you make the trip.

The museum exists because of change. Tanglin Halt, an estate named after the trains that used to halt there, had low-rise flats and ten-storey blocks with diagonal staircases, and it starred in Eric Khoo's film Wanton Mee. As demolition loomed under HDB's redevelopment scheme, My Community, a non-profit heritage group, put together a museum in a single unit beside the food centre. It opened around the turn of 2019, billed as Singapore's first ground-up community museum. The new home was planned at 300 square metres against the old 45.

The collection is gloriously ordinary, which is exactly the point. At launch it held more than 2,000 photographs, 300 oral histories and 50 artefacts; the team has since gathered over 6,000 items about how Queenstown residents lived, worked, studied, played and prayed. Look for bowling pins from the area's old bowling alley, a cheque-writer from a Mei Ling bookshop, a biscuit tin from a long-gone factory and an Orchid series banknote showing Tanglin Halt's diagonal-staircase blocks. The one we would go for is a neon pink sign spelling Queenstown in Chinese, rescued from the defunct Queenstown cinema.

It is a community effort through and through. About 1,000 volunteers aged 18 to 90 have taken part, with churches and temples among the contributors, and one young architecture graduate on the design team admitted the “uncles and aunties” were “very passionate” about what went where. At the old site, entry was free and volunteers led the tours.

The stories behind the objects are half the reward. Singapore's first locally assembled black-and-white televisions were made at the Setron factory in Tanglin Halt, a Van Houten chocolate factory once employed residents, and the 1960s band The Quests took its name from a Queenstown school magazine. The old museum was even painted light blue as a nod to Queenstown MRT's walls and the tinted windows of early flats.

How to do it well: confirm the opening first, then go for the small things – the shop signs, the biscuit tins, the photographs of an estate that no longer looks like this. Pair it with a walk past the conserved Queenstown Library on Margaret Drive. With children, it is a gentle way to show them what a neighbourhood used to be; with a grandparent who lived nearby, expect to be there longer than planned.

Good to know Block 30A Margaret Drive. Confirm the museum has reopened, and its hours, on My Community's channels before you go; entry was free at the old Tanglin Halt site.

Museum @ My Queenstown | Block 30A Margaret Drive, Singapore