The Gateway into the Lost World

It is in a deserted and somewhat forgotten corner of Singapore, that you will find the Gateway into the Lost World. It stands alone – the space to which it opens into is one that nature has reclaimed, giving little away as to what it might once have been.

Once surrounded by a world we now have sought to forget, that of a village of wooden dwellings that was serenaded by the songs of the nearby sea, the gateway stands all alone except for the mosque that does remind us of what might once have been.

In surroundings that does take one well away from the madness of the urban world, it probably isn’t hard to imagine what might once have been – a space in which the joy and peace of  waking to the smell of the sea would quite easily be found. It also isn’t difficult to imagine it as a place that would have inspired one who lived there to paint, as a talented architect who I suspect did live in a house beyond the now lonesome gates (word is that the gateway was to a house in which an architect of European origin lived), did –  producing more than 50 seascapes with watercolours that were the subject of an exhibition at the Lone Pine Gallery at Ming Court Hotel (now Orchard Parade Hotel) in 1986.

The architect, James Westwater Ferrie who started a well known local architectural firm James Ferrie and Partners, arrived in Singapore from the UK in 1948. Having described himself in an interview about the exhibition that was published in 27 January 1986 edition of The Straits Times, as having “always like the sea” and being “closely associated with water”, he was I an avid sailor who sought also to live by the sea. He also offered a brief description of where he had lived: “in Sembawang with a garden stretching down to the sea” in explaining that the focus of his paintings was on “the skies and boats” where he lived. 

Ferrie passed away in the UK in February 1993, and it would only be in his paintings, that the memory of the world around him in Sembawang is preserved, with the boats he sought to depict having long disappeared along with the villagers the boats belong to. The area however does remain a place to seek that peace Ferrie would have sought in building his home by the sea, having been spared thus far from the sea of concrete that is fast spreading through what once might have been an island in the sun. It may however not be long before the sound of a silence that now complements the songs of the sea will, as with the world the gateway did lead to, be a thing we would only be able to imagine as the relentless march of concrete does seem now to be very close to its doorstep.

The nearby mosque in the woods (Masjid Petempatan Melayu).

The greenery that now surrounds the area.