History

Construction on Singapore’s first purpose-built civil airport began in 1931 on reclaimed land along Kallang Basin, then a swampy estuary on the colony’s eastern fringe. The project was overseen by the colonial Public Works Department and represented a deliberate statement of imperial modernity: Singapore was establishing itself as a hub on the long-haul air routes linking Britain to Australia. The terminal was structurally complete by 1935, when three Hawker Hart biplanes from HMS Hermes made the first recorded landings on 21 November of that year.

The official inauguration came on 12 June 1937, when Governor Sir Shenton Thomas formally declared the airport open. The timing was deliberate — Imperial Airways had begun operating a trunk route between London and Singapore, and the colonial government wanted a terminus worthy of the occasion. The terminal’s smooth curved facade, horizontal banding, and streamlined tower spoke a design language that was self-consciously forward-looking: the Streamline Moderne idiom translated into reinforced concrete for a tropical climate.

Within months of the opening, Kallang attracted some of the most celebrated aviators of the era. The American pioneer Amelia Earhart, who stopped in Singapore during her ill-fated 1937 round-the-world attempt, reportedly described the airport as “the aviation miracle of the East” — a phrase reported in contemporary Straits Times accounts, though the exact circumstances of her visit remain imprecise in the surviving record. Whether or not the precise wording is hers, the contemporary press reception in Singapore was rapturous.

By 1950 Kallang was ranked the second-busiest airport in Southeast Asia, handling an ever-expanding range of carriers. Its single runway of 1,676 metres, originally grass-surfaced and later paved in concrete, increasingly strained against the demands of the postwar generation of larger aircraft. On 21 August 1955, civil operations transferred to the new Paya Lebar Airport; Kallang was repurposed by the Royal Air Force until British forces departed in the early 1970s. The terminal then fell into partial disuse before a conservation effort returned parts of it to public use in 1994. The Urban Redevelopment Authority formally gazetted the building for conservation in 2008, securing its principal structures in perpetuity.