Foodies might be familiar with the Bukit Timah Food Centre - or what is otherwise known as 7th Mile. Further down Upper Bukit Timah Road lies 10th Mile Junction - which had been renamed Junction 10.

There are other places in Singapore which used to have similar names. Simon Road, in today's Kovan district, used to be called Hougang 6th Milestone (or lark kok jio 六條石). The Chong Pang (Old) Village which used to occupy an area along Sembawang Road used to be called Sembawang 13½th Milestone. Heritage blogger Jerome Lim documented more interesting examples of places with old milestone names here.

These old names are remnants of an old address system which used milestones as a way to identify places when roads began to develop out of the city area. Since there was no such thing as a postal code nor GPS system back then, the use of milestones was an easy way for people to identify important places - for example, villages or an open air cinema (which once stood at present day 10 Mile Junction).

The milestone system was likely introduced by the British in the 1840s.

This was how it worked: The General Post Office (today's Fullerton Hotel) was point zero from where the main roads radiated. Every mile interval along the roads had a granite milestone indicating how far it was from the post office, as seen in the postal map below.

In 2014, a member of the public discovered what could be our last surviving milestone along Geylang Road. It had a stylised number "3" inscribed on it and corresponded to the third mile along an old main thoroughfare from the General Post Office. This video by the National Heritage Board (NHB) documented how the NHB team extracted the milestone.

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As the rural villages disappeared and Singapore developed a more comprehensive address system, the use of milestones gradually disappeared from everyday use and was replaced by the street numbering we know today.

Top screen grab from Youtube.

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