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ORCHARD AREA

Goodwood Park Hotel Tower Wing In 1861, with the Orchard Road area developing from a plantation area into a residential district popular with Europeans, Singapore's prosperous Germans purchased a piece of land on Scotts Road to build a community clubhouse, to be called the Teutonia Club. The design was entrusted to Swan and McLaren and placed in the hands of R. A. J. Bidwell, who chose for the building the lively Dutch-, French-, and Englishinfluenced Queen Anne style, which had emerged in England in the late 19th century. The L-shaped plan enclosed two large halls linked by a prominent projecting porte-cochere at the corner. The halls had generous verandas both front and back, which separated guests from service staff and ensured adequate ventilation.

The club officially opened on September 21, 1900, but toward the end of March 1915, as the reverberations of World War I spread around the world, some 300 German nationals in Penang and Singapore were classified as enemy aliens and, together with their families, shipped to be interned in Australia. Their possessions, including the clubhouse, were confiscated and liquidated at public auction. Three brothers purchased the club, renaming it Goodwood Hall after the famous Goodwood Racecourse and using it as a performance venue (for 2 nights in December 1922, ballerina Anna Pavlova performed there with her troupe) before converting it to a hotel in the late 1920s. During the Japanese occupation the hotel was used by senior Japanese officers, and after the war, the Army War Crimes Office conducted trials on the premises. Plans in the seventies that called for the replacement of the Tower Wing with a 16-story modern building, complete with bubble lift, were abandoned when it was vocally criticized by the public. Instead, a new tower, which faintly resembles the original, was built in 1978. It's only a replica, but for the record it's an official national monument. The hotel's public areas are open to nonguests.
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