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Singapore. What is possibly the last wartime civilian air-raid shelter here will welcome groups of visitors on guided tours next month.

The shelter, occupying the ground floor of Block 78, Guan Chuan Street in a quiet corner of Tiong Bahru, has had an anonymous existence all this time.

No signs have pointed casual passers-by to it, and the whitewashed brick walls of its exterior betray little of the purpose for which the 1,500 sq m space was built.

But it was this space that gave about 100 people from the neighborhood shelter during the Japanese air raids between December 1941 and January 1942, shortly before Singapore fell during World War II.

Built in 1940 by the Singapore Improvement Trust, the colonial predecessor to the Housing Board, it was the only air-raid shelter to have been incorporated into public housing at the time.

The National Heritage Board (NHB), seeking to mark the 70th anniversary of the battle for and eventual fall of Singapore, will organise the tours. It will also launch a community exhibition at the nearby Tiong Bahru market.

Photos, oral accounts and material gleaned from Britain’s Imperial War Museum will tell the history of pre-war and wartime air-raid shelters here.

The tours and exhibition are part of a larger schedule of events to mark the anniversary. These include an exhibition of artwork by former prisoner of war William Haxworth and Singaporean artist Liu Kang at the National Library, the launch of heritage trails at Reflections At Bukit Chandu, and a remembrance ceremony at the Kranji War Memorial on Feb. 15, 70 years to the day Singapore fell.

Alvin Tan, the NHB’s director of heritage institutions and industry development, said: “The guided tours and exhibition are part of the overall experience that NHB is providing to commemorate the Battle for Singapore.”

He said the NHB hopes to raise public awareness of Singapore’s war history and highlight the people’s resilience in that early phase of nation-building.

Although in good condition, the shelter is not entirely in its original state. The HDB, which has been using the shelter as a storage space, retrofitted it with fluorescent lights.

Other changes, which Tan described as “minor renovations,” included the knocking-down of some walls, and the cementing-over of some original entrances and skylights. Little will be done to the space ahead of visits by history buffs and students of Singapore history.

“If we do it too nicely, it will lose its authenticity,” said Tan.

The exposed red bricks of the interior walls are unadorned. Overhead, planks and pipes run, unhidden, and the concrete ceiling and pillars are unpainted.

Some graffiti, including Chinese characters in black paint, are on the walls in the shelter, but the NHB is unsure when these marks were made.

The shelter has memories for Singaporeans like Andrew Bosco Callistus Pereira, 75.

Just five years old when the bombs began falling on Singapore, he said: “It was spacious down there, but dark, and if I recall correctly, we had just a few kerosene lamps.”

The sound of the air-raid siren is etched in his memory, he said, as are the bright beams of searchlights that criss-crossed the sky outside the shelter.

One reason the shelter is intact could be because it was little used.

Peter Chan, a 58-year-old businessman whose grandfather Chan Chun Wing was a volunteer air-raid marshal in Tiong Bahru, said only one dry run of evacuation to the shelter was held — in the daytime — after the shelter was built ahead of the war.

But the Japanese launched their bombing campaign on Singapore at 4 a.m. on Dec. 8, 1941. At that hour, most residents were asleep in their own homes and under-prepared to evacuate to the shelter, although it was used the following month.

Chan said: “My grandfather said people nearby did use the shelter when the sirens went off, but those were mostly false alarms. It was actually hardly used.”

Reprinted courtesy of Straits Times Indonesia. To subscribe to Straits Times Indonesia and/or the Jakarta Globe call 021 2553 5055.