MBS hotel and lasers
Marina Bay is these days the central location of Singapore city. There are other popular locations: the various quays along Singapore River all of which are now converted to bars and restaurants, Kampong Glam and Little India, but it’s Marina Bay that dominates the downtown landscape.
This is actually a new thing – the whole of the southern and eastern side of the Bay is reclaimed land. I’ve tried to show this in the crude illustration below. Everything to the right of the black line is reclaimed (or new) land. The dotted section indicates that the quayside just to its left, Collier’s Quay, was the limit of the land, and faced the open sea. If you look at the road names you can get a clue about this – Esplanade Drive at the top of the map suggests that originally that was the shoreline, and Raffles Quay near the bottom suggests the same. (The roads themselves are new, of course – there were no dual-carriageway express roads until the last couple of decades or so – but they’ve inherited names from former roads and landmarks.)
So even the land on which now stand the Marina Bay Sands Hotel and the new business district did not exist until 30 years or so ago. Even after that Singapore took its time deciding what to do with it, and undertook various other required infrastructure works first – for example, the cleaning up of the Singapore river (which feeds into Marina Bay). Another huge project was the water management and the construction of the Marina Bay barrage – extraordinarily, what was once the mouth of a heavily-polluted river and the open sea into which it flowed is now a fresh-water reservoir, from which Singapore gets 10% of its water. So it was only in the early 00’s that serious construction started on the big projects around the Bay – Gardens by the Bay, the new financial district, the renovation of Colliers Quay, and the Marina Bay Sands hotel and its associated structures – and final development work continued until maybe 2015 or so, with the completion of the various components of the complete pedestrian route around the Bay.
It’s a popular area with visitors and Singaporeans alike. As I mentioned above it’s now possible to walk all round the Bay along dedicated pedestrian footpaths. Two dramatic footbridges cross open water – the Helix bridge near the hotel which crosses the lower end of the Bay, and the Esplanade bridge which crosses the mouth of the Singapore River. The whole walk is a few kilometres long, and, given that this is Singapore, walking it can be a hot sweaty business. Best to do it in stages, which is easy – there are air-conditioned restaurants, bars, and shopping mall every couple of hundred yards or so along three sides of the square.
For me, the big attraction is the scenery and the opportunity to take pictures. I had my camera with me and some lenses, and I’d even managed to squeeze my tripod into my suitcase (and my checked baggage allowance). I went out and took images around the Marina Bay three times. The first was in the daytime on my first full day. That was a very grey day (after the sun I got in Haji Lane) and turned to heavy rain in the late morning, so I regarded that walk round as just a location scouting exercise. The following evening I went back and took a number of shots as the sun went down and in the early darkness; and the evening after that I went back again a little later in the evening to catch the nightly laser show from the Marina Bay Sands hotel. Enjoy!
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- The Merlion
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- MBS Hotel and Arts Sciences museum
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- The Helix bridge
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- The Fullerton Hotel and the Esplanade footbridge in front of it
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- MBS, Marina Bay and the Merlion
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- MBS hotel and lasers
Notes:
- the Marina Bay Sands hotel is, in part, a casino (Singapore’s first). This is supposedly reflected in the architecture – if you look at the towers you’re suppose to think that each one is actually two playing cards on end and leaning into each other. The top deck includes an observation deck, and (for residents only) an infinity pool and various relaxation areas. But with 2,500 rooms, getting your turn in the pool is apparently a struggle;
- The merlion is the symbol of Singapore. There are a few Merlion statues dotted around – I’ve seen a small one up on top of Mount Faber – but this is the official one. There are always crowds of people around it;
- The Fullerton Hotel was built during the colonial period. It was originally the main Post Office for the colony. It stood at the mouth of the Singapore River and at the head of Collier’s Quay, the main landing point for passengers arriving by ship.
