Victoria Concert Hall

The building facing you has served as a town hall, a hospital, a war-crimes courtroom, and a concert stage, sometimes within the same decade. The guide traces its start as Singapore's grandest civic stage in eighteen sixty-two, and the public subscription that funded a memorial concert hall after Queen Victoria's death. It also follows the bronze statue of Raffles in the forecourt, standing since nineteen nineteen, through the statue's removal into storage during the Japanese occupation.