Is Jalan Besar the New Tiong Bahru? Two Neighbourhoods, Two Very Different Origins

Every few years someone calls Jalan Besar “the new Tiong Bahru”. We cook on Hamilton Road, a few minutes off Jalan Besar, so we have a stake in the answer and we will declare it up front. But the comparison is worth taking seriously rather than just enjoying, because it is half right in an interesting way: the two neighbourhoods ended up in similar places by completely different roads.

The history below is from the National Library Board’s Infopedia articles on Tiong Bahru and Jalan Besar, and from a 2020 NTU paper on Singapore street names, “Colonialism and Toponyms in Singapore” by Samantha Yom and Francesco Cavallaro. All three were read on 28 September 2026.

Both names are less glamorous than the neighbourhoods

Start with a detail that makes the comparison fun. “Tiong Bahru” combines the Chinese tiong, “cemetery”, with the Malay bahru, “new”: it was the new cemetery, beside an older Chinese burial ground on the site of today’s Singapore General Hospital.

Jalan Besar is plainly Malay for “big road”. But according to Yom and Cavallaro, Hokkien and Cantonese speakers called it something far less flattering — the equivalent of “the slaughter-pig depot in Kampong Kapor”, after the municipal abattoirs nearby. One of Singapore’s favourite brunch neighbourhoods is named after graves; one of its favourite dinner neighbourhoods was known for pigs. Neither is on the tote bags.

Tiong Bahru was planned. Jalan Besar accumulated.

This is the real difference, and it shapes everything you see on the street today.

Tiong Bahru is a designed estate. The library describes a village, Kampong Tiong Bahru, that by the 1920s was overcrowded and unsanitary. The Singapore Improvement Trust — the colonial forerunner of the HDB — cleared it from 1928, moved the graves, levelled the hills and sand-filled the swamp. When it could not sell the sites to private developers, it decided in 1936 to build the estate itself. Block 55, the first, was ready by December 1936 with 28 flats and four shops; by 1941 there were 784 flats and around 6,000 residents. The architects borrowed from British new towns like Stevenage and Harlow and worked in Art Deco and International style, with exterior spiral staircases, courtyards and kitchen air-wells — locals called the pre-war blocks “aeroplane” flats because they resembled the control tower at Kallang Airport.

Jalan Besar was never planned as a whole. It began, the library says, as a track through a betel-nut and nipah plantation that two brothers bought from the East India Company in the 1830s for 113 rupees. A proper road came in the 1880s; the leftover land was sold as building lots; and shophouses went up plot by plot for Indian, Chinese, Peranakan, Boyanese, European, Eurasian and Malay residents. The side streets were only named, by committee, on 5 August 1926 — after First World War commanders and battlefields, which is why you eat on Tyrwhitt Road and park near Foch Road. We went down that rabbit hole properly in our post on Hamilton Road.

One is an estate of flats with a market in the middle. The other is a grid of shophouses that grew around a road. That is not a small distinction.

Where the comparison is right: conservation came first, the cafés followed

The part of the “new Tiong Bahru” line that holds up is the sequence. The library is explicit about Tiong Bahru: on 1 December 2003 twenty blocks of pre-war SIT flats were given conservation status, and because of that status, cafés, eateries and independent shops moved in alongside the old businesses and the estate became known as a hip neighbourhood.

Jalan Besar’s conservation came earlier. The library’s article notes that the area has been gazetted as a conservation area to protect its heritage character, and its reading list includes the Urban Redevelopment Authority’s conservation guidelines for the Jalan Besar Conservation Area, published in 1991. So the protected fabric was in place first here too; the coffee simply arrived later.

And when it arrived, it arrived in the same kind of building. The single address that did most to put Jalan Besar on a coffee map is Chye Seng Huat Hardware at 150 Tyrwhitt Road — a conserved Art Deco hardware shop turned roastery. Art Deco, conservation, a café in a building meant for something else: that is the Tiong Bahru formula exactly, one neighbourhood over. If you want the full morning version, our Jalan Besar café guide has it and the bakeries on our own street, with hours checked on each venue’s own website.

Where it is wrong: what the street does after dark

Here is where we part company with the comparison. Tiong Bahru, as most people use it, is a morning neighbourhood — a bakery queue, a market breakfast, a walk around the blocks. (Its best-known bakery is on our brunch guide, if that is your Saturday.)

Jalan Besar was a working district long before it was a leisure one, and it still keeps working hours that run late. Swee Choon has been feeding the area since 1962 and serves dim sum into the small hours; the smokehouse on Cavan Road and our own charcoal grill run through the evening; the bars on Tyrwhitt pour until late. Our Jalan Besar food guide has the whole triangle, and the bars guide has the closing times up front.

If Tiong Bahru is where you have breakfast, Jalan Besar is where you have dinner and then wonder where the time went. That is the real answer to the question, and it is why we did not think twice about moving our kitchen here.

So: is it the new Tiong Bahru?

No — and the “no” is a compliment to both. Tiong Bahru is a rare survival: Singapore’s first public housing estate, with its pre-war blocks still standing and protected. Nowhere else will be the new version of that. Jalan Besar is a different kind of rare: a shophouse district that was never cleared and rebuilt, still mixing hardware shops, supper spots, roasteries and restaurants on the same stretch.

What the two share is a lesson rather than a look: protect the buildings, and the neighbourhood will reinvent itself inside them. Tiong Bahru did it with coffee and bakeries. Jalan Besar is doing it with coffee in the morning and fire at night.

If you are coming to see for yourself

Make it an evening rather than a morning. Walk Tyrwhitt Road around 5pm, before dinner; our food crawl lays out four routes with the last orders lined up. Coming from the East–West Line instead, the Lavender food guide covers the walk in.

Then end at 29 Hamilton Road. We are Japanese–Middle Eastern food over charcoal — mezze, small plates, a grill section and a bar — open Tuesday to Sunday, 5pm to 11pm, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday, 11am to 2.30pm, if you want to test the Tiong Bahru theory at the Tiong Bahru hour. The menu is here, the room is in the gallery, and you can book a table here.

Sources: National Library Board, Singapore Infopedia, “Tiong Bahru” and “Jalan Besar” (Renuka M.); S. J. Yom and F. Cavallaro, “Colonialism and Toponyms in Singapore”, Urban Science 4(4), 64 (2020). All read 28 September 2026. Venue details are from our own guides linked above, each checked against the venue’s own website on the date given in that guide.