HarbourFront is a waterfront district situated in southern

Singapore Singapore, officially the Republic of Singapore, is an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia. The country's territory comprises one main island, 63 satellite islands and islets, and one outlying islet. It is about one degree ...

. Whilst HarbourFront's boundaries are ambiguous, its location is roughly represented on the URA's Master Plan as a subzone called Maritime Square, located within the Bukit Merah Planning Area. Main thoroughfares in HarbourFront include Keppel Way and Telok Blangah Road. Notable buildings in the vicinity include

HarbourFront Centre Harbourfront Centre is a cultural organization on the waterfront of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated at 235 Queens Quay West. Established as a crown corporation in 1972 by the Government of Canada to create a waterfront park, it became a no ...

Singapore Cruise Centre The Singapore Cruise Centre ( abbrev: SCC; Chinese: 新加坡邮轮中心) is a cruise terminal located in the south of Singapore next to HarbourFront Centre in the vicinity of HarbourFront and in Keppel Harbour, near HarbourFront MRT s ...

St James Power Station St James Power Station is a building located in HarbourFront, Singapore. Built in 1926, it was Singapore's first power station, having supplied electricity to the nearby port and the surrounding industries, shipyards and residences. It was previ ...

VivoCity VivoCity is a shopping mall located in the HarbourFront precinct of Bukit Merah, Singapore. It is the largest shopping mall in Singapore, with of net lettable area and of gross floor area spread over a three-storey shopping complex and t ...

and the Jardine Steps Tower which hosts the HarbourFront stop of the

Singapore Cable Car The Singapore Cable Car is a gondola lift in Singapore, providing an aerial link from Mount Faber (Faber Peak Singapore) on Singapore Island to the resort island of Sentosa across the Keppel Harbour. Opened on 15 February 1974, it was the s ...

. Maritime Square is currently being redeveloped into a new business and lifestyle hub.

Etymology

The area was originally known as Seah Im but was also referred to as Jardine Steps. After the

Port of Singapore The Port of Singapore is the collection of facilities and container terminal, terminals that conduct maritime trade and handle Singapore's harbours and shipping. It has been ranked as the top maritime capital of the world, since 2015. Currently ...

expanded, it was developed into Maritime Square and later renamed as HarbourFront. The present-day appellation, HarbourFront, was coined in the 2000s to give the area a more upmarket feel.

History

HarbourFront was once close to the southernmost point of the main island of Singapore, until

land reclamation Land reclamation, often known as reclamation, and also known as land fill (not to be confused with a waste landfill), is the process of creating new Terrestrial ecoregion, land from oceans, list of seas, seas, Stream bed, riverbeds or lake ...

Tanjong Pagar Tanjong Pagar ( alternatively spelled ''Tanjung Pagar'') is a historic district located within the Central Business District of Singapore, straddling the Outram Planning Area and the Downtown Core under the Urban Redevelopment Authority's urba ...

and

Tuas Tuas ( ) is a planning area located within the West Region of Singapore. It is bounded by the Western Water Catchment to its north, Pioneer to its east and the Straits of Johor to its west. Tuas also shares a maritime boundary with the Weste ...

. Its location in the sheltered waters of

Keppel Harbour Keppel Harbour (; ), also called the Keppel Channel and formerly New Harbour, is a stretch of water in Singapore between the mainland and the southern islands of Pulau Brani and Sentosa (formerly Pulau Blakang Mati). Its naturally sheltered and de ...

helped the area to thrive as a commercial area adjacent to Keppel Shipyards, particularly with the building of the former World Trade Centre in 1978. Singapore's first major Exhibitions and Conventions venue, the World Trade Centre Exhibition Complex, was subsequently built beside the World Trade Centre, and also served as a transport node with ferries to Sentosa and other regional destinations such as

Batam Batam, officially the City of Batam (, not to be confused with ''Batam Kota'', a kecamatan, district within this city), is the largest List of regencies and cities of Indonesia, city in the Indonesian province of Riau Islands. The city administra ...

. The

opened in 1991 in HarbourFront as the country's first international cruise terminal. Massive redevelopment in the area after the closure of the shipyard subsequently led to the name HarbourFront being coined in the early 2000s to refer to the immediate vicinity of the World Trade Centre, which was in the midst of a major refurbishment project. Relaunched as

, the former World Trade Centre also has its neighbouring Exhibition Complex demolished to make way for

, the upgrading of the Cable Car Towers (old Jardine Steps Station on top the old PSA Tower) and the construction of two new office blocks adjacent to it. Transportation into the area was vastly improved with the opening of the

HarbourFront MRT station HarbourFront MRT station is an underground Mass Rapid Transit (Singapore), Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) interchange station in Singapore. The termini of the North East MRT line, North East line (NEL) and Circle MRT line, Circle line (CCL), the stat ...

and extension of the

HarbourFront Bus Interchange HarbourFront Bus Interchange is located within HarbourFront along Seah Im Road off Telok Blangah Road in Bukit Merah planning area, Singapore. The interchange serves the nearby residential estates of Telok Blangah and Bukit Purmei and also the ...

. Also, the new

monorail A monorail is a Rail transport, railway in which the track consists of a single rail or beam. Colloquially, the term "monorail" is often used to describe any form of elevated rail or people mover. More accurately, the term refers to the style ...

link to Sentosa, the

Sentosa Express The Sentosa Express is a monorail line connecting Sentosa island to HarbourFront on the Singapore mainland. It was built at a cost of S$140 million to replace the previous Sentosa Monorail. Development began in June 2003 and construction wo ...

has been completed and opened on 15 January 2007. The HarbourFront station of the Circle line had opened on 8 October 2011. A new six-storey office building is also in the works as a new addition to the HarbourFront Office Park. The new site is referred to as the HarbourFront Merrill Lynch, which is a six-storey building and will be entirely occupied by American bank

Merrill Lynch Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Incorporated, doing business as Merrill, and previously branded Merrill Lynch, is an American investment management and wealth management division of Bank of America. Along with BofA Securities, the investm ...

with a total area of . Another office development is being planned on the site of the current

SPI Building SPI may refer to: Organizations * Indian Protection Service (''Serviço de Proteção ao Índio''), Brazil * Shotmed Paper Industries, an Egyptian paper manufacturers * Simulations Publications, Inc., a former US board game publisher * Sony Pic ...

. Furthermore, a

residential A residential area is a land used in which houses, housing predominates, as opposed to industrial district, industrial and Commercial Area, commercial areas. Housing may vary significantly between, and through, residential areas. These include ...

development is possible in the future. The Singapore Cruise Centre would be expanded to accommodate over 6 million passengers by 2010.

References

External links

The HarbourFront Precinct Masterplan

The HarbourFront Precinct Masterplan
{{Singapore border crossings, state=autocollapse Places in Singapore Bukit Merah Redeveloped ports and waterfronts in Singapore Shopping districts and streets in Singapore