History
Once a seafront promenade, Queen Elizabeth Walk was part of the Esplanade, a long open stretch of field by the sea, although it was not until 1953 that it got its name. Before the land reclamation project in 1843, the original shoreline touched the 70-yard (64 m) wide Esplanade, approximately at the edges of both the Singapore Cricket Club and Singapore Recreation Club buildings.
Further landfill and reclamation in 1890 enabled the widening of the Esplanade when an area almost equivalent to Raffles' Plain (now the Padang) was added to its coastal side. A sea wall was also built and a new road, called New Esplanade Road, was formed. New Esplanade Road sat on the curve of the original shoreline and formed a circuit with Old Esplanade Road, now Saint Andrew's Road, which was popular for evening carriage rides among the leisurely class. In 1907, New Esplanade Road was renamed Connaught Drive, to commemorate the visit of Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, and his brother, King Edward VII, the year before.
In the early years of the twentieth century, ths scenic coastal road stretched all the way from the city to Keppel Harbour. The instructions, "jalan tepi laut" in Malay, meaning "go by the seaside", were understood by all and sundry.
In 1922, there was further reclamation off the coast along Connaught Drive and the new land became the Esplanade Park. In 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned and Singapore commemorated the event by sprucing up Connaught Drive and renaming the Esplanade Park as Queen Elizabeth Walk. It was officially declared open by Lady McNeice on 30 May 1953.
With newly planted shady trees and neatly trimmed shrubs, the promenade quickly became a favourite place for an evening stroll. From there, strollers could catch the sea breeze, admire hundreds of ships in the harbour with their colourful fluttering flags and eat freshly barbecued satay at the Satay Club, which consisted of a collection of seafront hawker stalls.
Read more about this topic: Queen Elizabeth Walk
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)