History
The House at the End of Upper Wilkie Road
Emily Hill is located at the end of Upper Wilkie Road, No.11, at a very prominent location on Mount Emily, which overlooks the Middle Road part of the city. It is one of the grand houses that were built on the hills around the area, but whose exact early history is yet to be uncovered.
Materials about this house retrieved from the National Archives include a building plan showing additions and alterations for a Mr. J. Ikeda in September 1935, where a kitchen and floors were added to the two-storey colonial bungalow and its ancillary structures.
Several years later, it served as the Japanese General Consulate from 1939 to 1941. Here, we need to account for the Japanese community, which like many other communities, and most notably the Hainanese, grew on both sides of Middle Road which to the Japanese was called “Chua Dori” or Central Street.
Thus, the occupation of the consulate at 11 Upper Wilkie Road was symbolically significant to the Japanese as it would be aligned on the axis with Middle Road – its main thoroughfare, and located near to the colonial Government House on the other hill. However, because of Japan’s role in World War II, its entire community was repatriated and for four years after the war, no Japanese person was allowed to enter Singapore.
After the war, the premises were used by the Social Welfare Department of the Ministry of Social Affairs (later known as the Ministry of Community Development and now MCYS) to house juvenile Chinese prostitutes and for anti-vice and protection units. On 26 July 1969, extensions to the main building were completed and it opened as the Mount Emily Girls’ Home, where “hardcore delinquents from other homes numbering 40 to 50 girls were housed together".
In the 1980s, it underwent change yet again as the Wilkie Road Children’s Home, and subsequently as a counseling centre for drug addicts before an art school moved in.
Presently, with Emily Hill Enterprise Ltd taking over the premises to be used as a physical space for arts and business, the texture and tenor of the location as a site of multicultural activity and residence will be continued. If anything, this sketch of its vicinity over close to two centuries may serve to illustrate how this has been so for the area’s history, and how it remains an important area to consider the island’s complex histories.
Special Thanks to Lai Chee Kien, Archives & Oral History Department, Singapore
