Drift Like A Ghost Around Old SIT Blocks at Monk’s Hill in Newton Circus Singapore

Monk's Hill is a small, easily overlooked pocket of Singapore tucked between Bukit Timah Road, Cavenagh Road and Clemenceau Avenue, near Newton. Within it stands a cluster of Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) apartments, built by the colonial government in the mid-1950s — making them part of the last generation of housing constructed under SIT before the organisation was dissolved in 1960 and replaced by the Housing and Development Board (HDB). The SIT itself was Singapore's original public housing authority, formally established in 1927 as part of a colonial-era push to improve public health and bring down mortality rates on the island. Initially, it had a narrower mandate: draw up improvement plans, mark unsanitary buildings for demolition, and rehouse residents displaced by those schemes, without the power to build housing at scale. That changed with a 1930 amendment to the Singapore Improvement Ordinance, which let the SIT construct housing "as the Board may think fit," subject to the Governor's approval. The first SIT houses went up at Lorong Limau in 1932, and by 1941 the organisation had completed what is now regarded as Singapore's first public housing estate, at Tiong Bahru — work that paused when the Second World War broke out, before resuming afterward across the island. The Monk's Hill flats belong to this SIT lineage but stand apart architecturally from SIT developments found elsewhere in Singapore. Rather than the utilitarian, Streamline Moderne Art Deco style typical of estates like Tiong Bahru, the Monk's Hill blocks were designed as black-and-white apartments specifically for civil servants — spacious units with high ceilings, wide balconies, and tall rectangular windows, giving them a more genteel, almost colonial-bungalow character within a total of 120 residential units. They were originally owned by the Public Utilities Board (PUB) before passing into state management, where they continue to be rented out today on renewable two-year leases. The name "Monk's Hill" itself carries some etymological uncertainty. According to Singapore Street Names: A Study of Toponymics, it is thought to derive from the residence of a man named Carnie, who lived in the area during the 1860s — though the exact connection to "monks" remains murky, a common feature of Singapore's colonial-era place names. The neighbourhood's civic footprint extended beyond housing. Monk's Hill Primary School, once located at the junction of Winstedt Road and Monk's Hill Terrace, counted several notable figures among its alumni, including Winston Choo, Singapore's first Chief of Defence Force; Abdullah Tarmugi, former Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs; Shih Choon Fong, former President of the National University of Singapore; and Pathmanaban Selvadurai, a Member of Parliament from 1967 to 1984. After the school's lease to the Vocational and Industrial Training Board expired, its premises were repurposed in 1983 as a Ministry of Education language centre, then stood vacant for years before briefly housing two Islamic religious schools, Madrasah Aljunied al-Islamiah and Madrasah al-Irsyad, between 1996 and 2000. Today, the old school site has found a very different use: it is now occupied by LASALLE College of the Arts, closing out a quiet neighbourhood's long transformation from colonial civil-servant housing and local schooling into a site for contemporary arts education.