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National Library Board
Story Maps

Raffles Place Today

Explore the buildings and places of Raffles Place

Raffles Place today

For almost two centuries, Raffles Place has been the designated business district of Singapore. Located southwest of the mouth of Singapore River, it was originally a hilly area before it was levelled under the 1822 Singapore Town Plan and made into a commercial district. Prior to 1858, Raffles Place was called Commercial Square, and in the past 50 years, the area has witnessed major transformation when many of its old iconic buildings were replaced by modern skyscrapers.

Find out the name and history of these buildings in this story map (opens in new tab) or by scanning the QR code below.

Raffles Place Today QR code
Notes

  1. This story map does not show a comprehensive coverage of the buildings found in today’s Raffles Place.

  2. The base map used in this story map is the Singapore Land Authority's OneMap (opens in new tab).

  3. This story map used related Infopedia articles and other NLB digitised resources in NL Online (opens in new tab), BiblioAsia (opens in new tab), and Roots (opens in new tab) as references. It also consulted the following books: Singapore Street Names: A Study of Toponymics (opens in new tab) (2013), What’s in the Name?: How the Streets and Villages in Singapore Got Their Names (opens in new tab) (2018), Ray Tyers’ Singapore: Then & Now (opens in new tab) (2018), Singapore: A Guide to Buildings, Streets, Places (opens in new tab) (1988), In Granite and Chunam: The National Monuments of Singapore (opens in new tab) (1996), and Singapore: A Pictorial History 1819-2000 (opens in new tab) (1999).

Image Credit

Photo by Jukkabrother via Wikicommons (opens in new tab) (CC BY-SA 4.0)