After more than six decades of postal services, Alexandra Post Office has walked into history on 17 June 2023. The site it occupied will be part of a public housing project in the coming years.

Alexandra Post Office was opened on 24 August 1957 by Francis Thomas (1912-1977), then Minister for Communications and Works. Sometimes known as Alexandra Road Post Office or Prince Philip Avenue Post Office in its early days, the $120,000 post office offered a range of services, other than mails and parcels, to more than 60,000 people living and working in the vicinity.

In the early sixties, it was one of the venues in Singapore for the public to check their names in the electoral registers for upcoming elections. Alexandra Post Office also had a public phone to serve the residents. As public phones were still not commonly installed, there were often long queues lining up at the post office’s public phone, resulting in multiple feedbacks by frustrated residents to the Singapore Telephone Board (STB) to request for more public phone installations.

Other than the standard processing of postal orders and parcels, handling of registered mails and sale of stamps, Alexandra Post Office was also the place for collection of TV and driving licenses. In the mid-seventies, a Post Office Savings Bank (POSB) branch was established at the post office, one of the 10 POSB offices in Singapore that offered computerised services.

In 1981, Alexandra Post Office was closed for five months for renovation works to improve postal facilities and services. In 1986, the post office extended the express mail service to 13 new destinations including Germany, Italy, Holland, Hong Kong, Macau and South Korea.

The two-digit postal district number system was introduced in 1950, and was replaced by a more efficient four-digit postal code system in July 1979, in order to make the sorting easier due to the increasing volume of mails every year.

Alexandra Post Office’s postal code was 0315 and 0316 (3 for its postal district code, 15 and 16 for its postal sector codes). Its PO box was 9115 (91 was the characteristic code for all PO boxes in Singapore except Maxwell Road Post Office, and 15 was the sector code for Alexandra Post Office’s PO box). PO boxes were commonly used by local companies to receive job applications in the seventies and eighties.

After the 2000s, many post offices were relocated into integrated hubs at the town centres to provide more convenience to the public. A few remained in their standalone buildings, including Alexandra Post Office, Siglap Post Office and Serangoon Garden Post Office. Alexandra Post Office’s last co-tenant was Pat’s Schoolhouse, a preschool for children.

Between the fifties and nineties, Alexandra Post Office was part of a housing estate known as Prince Philip Avenue Estate and later Alexandra North Estate. It was made up of more than 70 Singapore Improvement Trust (SIT) public rental flats.

Built in batches from 1950 to 1952, these flats stood parallelly in rows in the area bounded by Alexandra Road, Prince Philip Avenue and Prince Charles Crescent. The Alexandra Canal cut through the middle of the housing estate. The blocks were typically three- and four-storey tall, and made up of one- and two-room units. Some of the blocks’ had shops at the ground levels. There was also a market, situated just beside Alexandra Post Office.

These SIT flats were part of the housing projects ramped up in the early fifties by the colonial government to cope with the increasing population in Singapore. Other similar projects were at Jalan Besar, Boon Keng Road, Havelock Road and Princess Elizabeth Estate.

Decades passed and by the early nineties, the housing estate was almost in disrepair. Many residents had relocated to newer Housing and Development Board (HDB) flats in the vicinity, but there were still about 400 long-time families living there who could not bear to leave the home where they had lived for many years.

The bulldozers moved in for the demolition in the early nineties. The housing estate’s Block 1 to 16 were the first to be torn down in 1990, followed by the demolition of Block 56 to 75 two years later. The remaining blocks were gone by 1996. Under Urban Redevelopment Authority’s (URA) 1998 Master Plan, this plot of land would be earmarked for future residential development.

The area was then left largely vacant for 20 years until the development of new private residential projects in the mid-2010s. Between Prince Philip Avenue and Prince Charles Crescent, new condominiums The Crest and Principal Garden were built and completed in 2017 and 2019 respectively.

As for the empty site between Prince Philip Avenue and Alexandra Road, the government announced in 2021 that it will be used for public housing development, where as many as 1,500 flats will be built.

Published: 18 June 2023