A total of seven walking tours organised by My Community will be relaunching in Singapore from October 2020.
The resumption is following the easing of public gathering restrictions with Covid-19 infections subsiding locally.
The various tours are organised according to locations.
They take participants to
- Keppel Harbour
- Mount Faber and Sentosa,
- Redhill,
- Telok Blangah,
- Holland Village,
- Tanglin Halt
- Tiong Bahru
Apart from a temporary freeze of tours in 2020 as a result of the circuit breaker and Phase 1 restrictions, My Community has since 2007 been regularly organising heritage tours.
It has conducted more than 1,000 guided walks and engaged more than 30,000 individuals to date.
Free tours
My Community tours are free and meant to expose participants to various aspects of Singapore history.
The Mount Faber and Sentosa tour, for example, takes participants to the abandoned and forgotten reservoir dating back to 1905 nestled amid thick overgrowth in the Mount Faber forest.
The reservoir once served as a swimming pool and remnants of a diving board and a bathing area still stand today.
60 volunteers activated
More than 60 volunteers have been activated to facilitate the resumption of My Community’s physical tours.
Tours take place on Saturdays and Sundays and have been shortened from their usual four-hour duration to approximately 1.5 hours.
My Community’s co-founder and executive director Kwek Li Yong said heritage activities such as these contribute to building resilience and bonds in the community - a necessity in these times.
He said: “Heritage is an ongoing process and the appreciation of our history and culture must continue. By understanding where we come from and who we are, we can build on our past as well as present-day Singaporean identity to face the various challenges ahead.”
He added that the civic group’s various tours offer a window into a long-gone world and present locals a chance to examine the little-known historical and cultural significance of installations, landmarks and curios along the various routes.
Heritage buff leading trails
Among the volunteer guides enlisted for the My Telok Blangah Heritage Tour is heritage buff Sarafian Salleh.
In 2019, he uncovered the stories of three large graves in an overgrown, abandoned cemetery lying along a jogging path leading to the Mount Faber cable car station.
The graves help shed light on the area’s past when it stood as a village known as Kampung Marang.
Said to have existed from the mid-1800s to the 1980s, it was home to 100 or so residents.
Sarafian said: “This tour in particular zooms in on the early settlements of Telok Blangah – a historically significant area of pre-and post-colonial Singapore with a 700-year history. These graves are a good starting point to help participants develop their understanding of Singapore’s early years of development and retrace forgotten villages and the like.”
Measures undertaken during pandemic period
All participants will have to be masked up and must arrive 10 minutes ahead of schedule for temperature checks.
They must also complete contact-free safe entry registration forms via a QR code.
To reduce the chance of virus transmission, My Community will not be distributing radio guides.
A maximum of 10 participants are allowed per tour. The group must walk in two subgroups of five.
As mandated by the authorities, each subgroup must maintain a 1m distance from each other at all times.
Mingling across tour groups is strictly forbidden.
To sign up for the tours, visit My Community’s Eventbrite page (https://www.eventbrite.sg/o/my-community-8432912044) or follow them on Facebook for updates.