The Landscapes of Swimming in Colonial Singapore: Reflections on Sources and Methods

Studies of Singapore’s urban history generally note that the city’s earliest swimming pools and lidos were only designed in the 1930s, making aquatic leisure landscapes a decidedly twentieth-century phenomena in that country. However, my current project on bathing cultures and swimming infrastructure in colonial Singapore finds that this is not really the case. Across the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many sites of public swimming and bathing were created: pools, lidos, bath-houses, spas, and designated sites in natural water bodies. The aim of this presentation, though, is not to document their history, but to reflect on the methods and sources that have allowed some reconstruction of it, discussing why these elements of water infrastructure and public leisure could have been so easily forgotten. The presentation is therefore developed as a source criticism, framed through the concept of historical mentalities.

As a part of social history, public and private bathing was a daily activity in the tropical climate of Singapore, and yet its early history is largely erased through limitations in records. One reason for this, I argue, is owing to changing understandings of swimming as a sited activity, which has effectively reclassified earlier bathing practices and locations as something distinct and different. Other reasons include the perceived intimacy of the activity, the commonplace nature of going into the water, colonial Singapore’s itinerant population, and the often vernacular architectural quality of designs that were used for bathing. All have, in certain ways, made these earlier bathing cultures resistant to documentation and posterity, allowing this aspect of urban history to fade from public memory. Here, I provide a picture of the methods and sources used in developing this project, exploring what these tell us about attitudes to bathing and the design of everyday leisure in the context of colonial Singapore.